Kruse Kronicle

Does Character Count? Does Virtue Matter?

"On this episode of "Calmly Considered," Michael and Allan explore why it appears that American society has jettisoned the importance of character and virtue for leadership, particularly in the realm of politics. Does character really count? Does virtue really matter?"

Calmly Considered: A Discussion on Deconstruction

On this episode of "Calmly Considered," Michael and Allan discuss deconstruction particularly as it relates to religion and faith. What is deconstruction? Is it new or something that's been around for a long time? Is deconstruction present in the Bible? Was Jesus a deconstructionist?

Calmly Considered: Scarcity or Abundance-- Which Is Our World?

Last month, Dr. Allan Bevere and I got together to discuss the nuances of "scarcity and abundance" from theological perspectives. Too often people from the two fields talk past each other with unfair characterizations on this topic. Our conversation hopefully shines some light.

Calmly Considered: How The Church Fails Businesspeople

Last week, I participated with Allan Bevere in a discussion centered on John Knapp's book "How The Church Fails Businesspeople (And What Can Be Done About It)." Discussion focuses on integrating our faith and working lives, with reflection on why that integration is so challenging.

Calmly Considered: Socialism vs. Capitalism-- Getting Beyond the Memes

"In this month's episode of "Calmly Considered" Michael Kruse and I discuss the complex realities of socialism and capitalism that are so often distorted by simplistic social media memes, caricatures, and politicians seeking re-election."

Thanks to Allan Bevere for hosting another fun discussion. Below the video are three articles related to our discussion you may find useful.

"Capitalism vs. Socialism is the Wrong Way to Frame Today's Economic Debate" https://www.bushcenter.org/catalyst/capitalism/streeter-reeves-capitalism-vs-socialism.html

 

"Capitalism vs. Socialism: What's the Difference?" https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/020915/what-are-differences-between-capitalism-and-socialism.asp

 

"Capitalism with Scandinavian Characteristics" https://www.startribune.com/capitalism-with-scandinavian-characteristics/505916412/

Calmly Considered: Economics, the New Testament, and the 21st Century (in podcast & videocast)

This is the first installment of a once-monthly series called Calmly Considered, in which Allan Bevere and I will be discussing topics related to faith and economics. In this episode, we discuss Peter Oakes'  Empire, Economics, and the New Testament. We barely scratch the surface but hopefully some meaningful dialog. 

The Keynesian Revolution and Our Empty Economy: We're All Dead - Book Review

The Keynesian Revolution and Our Empty Economy: We're All Dead  (Quotes are from the e-book version.)

Is economics value-free? Can it be? In the nineteenth century, economics emerged alongside other social sciences, aspiring to apply the scientific method to study human behavior. Economists distinguish positive and normative economics - positive being descriptive and normative being prescriptive. The latter requires value judgments, making it beyond the realm of science. While an economist may wish to offer their perspective on what should be done, economics eschews prescriptive behavior. But is that the way economics works?

In The Keynesian Revolution and Our Empty Economy: We're All Dead, Dr. Victor Claar, professor of economics at Florida Gulf Coast University, and Dr. Greg Forster, Director of the Okonomia Network at Trinity International University, argue the story economists tell about themselves does not match reality. Simply reading the book title, one might assume this is another installment in the ongoing battle between Keynesianism economics and other economic theories. It is not. The authors say something transformative happened in the 1930s with the rise of John Maynard Keynes' economics, misshaping the discipline. Virtually the entire discipline (including the free-market Chicago school and Austrian economics) battles about a means to an end from within the Keynesian framework. The authors conclude with thoughts on a reforming agenda but first take us on a rich historical journey.

"Economics" Before the Nineteenth Century

Until the nineteenth century, "economics" was part of moral philosophy - political economy. Philosophers and theologians made normative appeals for economic behavior. Human existence has ultimate purposes. They inseparably connected their normative prescriptions to teleological realities. The authors identify a succession of three ethical paradigms related to economic thought over the millennia.

Nature paradigm – Classical philosophy. "What sets classical thought apart is the idea that nature has purposes, and human excellence is fulfilling those purposes." Wisdom comes from correctly understanding nature and its purposes. From this wisdom, we shape our daily affairs, including economic activity.

God paradigm – Judeo-Christian theology. "It began with the assumption that human beings are created by and under the authority of God and are placed both within and over nature by God. Their economic needs and behaviors are structured by God's design in creation and are being restored to that design through the redemption of the world in Christ, so conformity to God and his purposes was their standard for economic thought."

Reason paradigm – Born in Enlightenment philosophy. "It began with the assumption that human beings are rational, and their economic needs and behaviors can be understood and arranged rationally, so conformity to reason and its purposes (they understood 'reason' to include moral reason, including teleology or purposes) was their standard for economic thought."

Claar and Forster revisit these three historic paradigms throughout the book, demonstrating their normative and teleological components in contrast with Keynes emerging philosophy in the 1930s. The authors identify a fourth paradigm with Keynes, the Consumption paradigm. So how did the Consumption paradigm emerge?

The Beginning of Modern Economics

As scholars labored to establish economics in the late nineteenth century, there was substantial intra-disciplinary conflict about how to proceed; differing on what roles historicism, theory, and science should play. (The book gives some great history.) John Neville Keynes, John Maynard Keynes' father, assumed the role of peacemaker. He popularized the "positive versus normative" frame and worked to move scholars beyond endless squabbling toward productive research, thereby gaining credibility for the discipline.

Despite these ambitions, economics was not born in a vacuum. From the 1890s to World War I, societal gatekeepers saw themselves as stewards of a moral and cultural order, envisioning evermore progress and human improvement in keeping with the Reason paradigm. Decades before, John Stuart Mill had introduced homo economicus, human beings as rational, utility-calculating machines. Mill and these later economists retained at least a sense of the progress teleology, even as they began to apply the scientific method to evaluating behavior. Homo economicus was a knowingly simplified anthropology, but with research, one might imagine revision and nuance could be brought to bear over time. A variety of social changes in the years before and through World War I rocked confidence in the progress narrative, leaving the discipline adrift. Enter John Maynard Keynes.

The Keynesian Revolution

We frequently view John Maynard Keynes as a tedious academic. In reality, Keynes was a core member of the highly influential Bloomsbury Group in London, a collection of intellectuals and artists including Leonard and Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Clive and Vanessa (Woolf) Bell, Duncan Grant, and Lytton Strachey. In Keynes's words, they embraced an "immoralist" philosophy devoted to pursuing pleasure. "Though they weren't sure what the highest forms of pleasure might be, their sense was that they could be found only among their greatest loves—in intimate relationships and in things like the arts, theater, and music—rather than in more pedestrian forms of enjoyment."

The Bloomsbury Group was disdainful of traditional values. This included values like diligence, frugality, and self-control, found in the Reason paradigm. Wealth accumulation and consumerism were dehumanizing influences obstructing the pursuit of pleasure. However, they believed only a select few could pursue pleasure as they envisioned. A materialistic bourgeois existence was the best for which the rest of humanity could hope. It was the task of the elite to shepherd the masses toward this end as the elite went about their higher pursuit of pleasure. Claar and Forster walk us through how Keynes' economics reflects this philosophy, but I will jump to a couple of takeaways for the sake of brevity.

The most revolutionary effect of Keynes' influence is his reshaping of means and ends. Mill introduced homo economicus as a rudimentary construct to aid in economic inquiry, not a characterization of human essence. Within Mill's construct was an assumption that we will rationally discern and pursue certain ends. Reason is the means for choosing between various courses of action to achieve those ends. These ends include teleological ends.

Keynes retains the idea of homo economicus but with substantial revision. With Keynes, there is no teleological purpose to guide economic behavior. "Animal spirits" drive human behavior, not reason, in pursuit of meaningful action. Reason is how each individual can best satisfy animalistic desires. Consumption to meet these desires takes center stage. For Keynes, homo economicus is not simply a methodological construct. It is an anthropological given. We must base economic policy on this premise.

In the General Theory [Keynes seminal book), economics abandons its nineteenth-century ambition to moral neutrality. It no longer seeks a place alongside chemistry and physics as a detached, disinterested, purely positive observer. It becomes, once again, a practical discipline with a moral vision.

But now the moral vision is radically different. Instead of the virtue, piety, or the progress of humanity, the moral vision of the General Theory is an animalistic homo economicus whose only economic goal is to satisfy his own consumption appetites. …

Another aspect of Keynes' influence is his introduction of "the economy." Before Keynes, economics was microeconomics. It was focused on how individuals, firms, and other players make decisions. Keynes introduced macroeconomics, focusing on the aggregate economic phenomenon for a nation or other large societal entity - money supply, interest rates, aggregate employment, gross domestic product, etc. Macroeconomics dominated the discipline to the point that when people hear "economics" today, they think of macroeconomic concepts.

For Keynes, "The economy" is a machine-like entity employed by elites like himself and members of the Bloomsbury Group in transmuting humanity to an elevated state. Keynes was sympathetic to socialist aims, but he writes:

It is not the ownership of the instruments of production which it is important for the State to assume. If the State is able to determine the aggregate amount of resources devoted to augmenting the instruments and the basic rate of reward to those who own them, it will have accomplished all that is necessary.

The authors note:

Keynes shares Marx's goal of giving the state control over our economic lives, which is to say, over all the most intimate and important decisions we make. He just thinks the state can accomplish this control without seizing ownership of assets.

The authors paraphrase Keynes' view this way:

In an ideal state, we would 'transmute' human nature, raising people not to care how much money they end up with after playing the "game" of money-making. However, for now we need to keep the game going. If we stop, we'll have nothing to eat; the economy runs not on productive work but on satisfying consumer appetites. Thus it is the responsibility of government to keep the game going. Keeping the game going involves all the players being highly motivated and playing to win—"strongly addicted to the money-making passion." The wise and prudent statesman will therefore "manage" human nature, keeping it in a state of socially beneficial greed , rather than attempt to "transmute" it toward real selflessness, at least so long as we live in the current state and not the ideal state.

Keynes has a vision of where he wants to take feckless humanity. His superior wisdom and that of people like his Bloomsbury peers will lead us there. Pragmatically, it must be done with manipulation. Moreover, some will never be transmuted. Keynes had an answer for that. He was chair of the British Eugenics Society from 1937-1944. He deemed eugenics to be the most important branch of sociology.

Keynesianism and Its Rivals

Claar and Forster explain Keynes was not particularly eloquent in expressing his ideas. Articulate acolytes popularized his economic constructs. For decades, Paul Samuelson, Nobel economist and author of the leading economics textbook, was probably the most important figure in advancing Keynesian ideas. However, these advocates made substantial qualifications to give us what we know as Keynesianism today.

The Keynesian advocates muted Keynes' crusading vision and reclaimed the idea of economics as a value-free science. However, they continued to embrace the view that people are bundles of appetites driven by animal spirits – Keynes' version of homo economicus. The goal should be to maximize consumption, enabling people to satisfy their appetites. Economists should guide the economy machine in these pursuits. This was the Consumption paradigm. It effectively institutionalized Keynes's homo economicus while eschewing teleological judgments.

The Chicago School (and the older but smaller Austrian School) emerged as the primary competition to Keynesian economics, rejecting Keynesian interventionism in favor of free market systems. They resisted "economics" as purely about large aggregate concepts and called for greater attention to microeconomic decision-making. Claar and Forster write:

However, the attention-grabbing conflict between these schools conceals a deeper uniformity. Both counter-revolutions accept most of the key elements of the Consumption paradigm. Most importantly, they accept Keynes' redefinition of the purpose of economic systems: to maximize consumption possibilities. They also accept Keynes' redefinition of Mill's homo economicus, which lay at the heart of the new focus on maximizing consumer satisfaction—they accept the instrumental rather than substantive understanding of rationality, and they accept the reversal of the relationship between gaining wealth and enjoying wealth.

The Keynesian constructs became so dominant that even schools that emerged to challenge aspects of Keynesian economics have internalized core Keynesian concepts.

The Consequences

The consequences extend well beyond an intra-disciplinary dispute. To a degree unparalleled by other social sciences, economics has succeeded in exerting influence over public policy and commerce, which has had ripple effects on other societal institutions. With varying degrees of resistance, homo economicus is largely how we institutionally treat our existence.

The problem, the authors would argue, is that we are not homo economicus. Human beings are meaning-makers. We see ourselves inside teleological narratives. We want not only to experience pleasure but also to participate in activities with lasting significance. We have not only consumption preferences but also production preferences. The impact of homo economicus is a world with greater prosperity, but that is largely vacant of meaning. In an existential sense, "we are all dead." This lack of meaning has people restless and increasingly impatient with societal institutions. A consequence is the rise in populism ranging from Donald Trump to Bernie Sanders, amassing power by feeding on palpable anger and frustration.

The empty economy produces polarization, because our daily economic activities no longer convey meaning and purpose (leaving us to seek those things in extreme movements) and because our daily economic activities no longer establish shared, public moral commitments (leaving us convinced we have no common ground with our neighbors). 

A Way Forward

"What would it look like to study economics on the assumption that people really do have higher purposes in life, but that we need not agree about everything concerning those purposes?"

The authors argue that the way forward is to escape the Consumption paradigm with its "animal spirits" anthropology and revisit teleological and anthropological assumptions. We may not thoroughly agree on every value across nations and cultures or even within them, but our values have much more in common than we may think. Some things are good whether everyone chooses to do them.

* People have production preferences as well as consumption preferences, including a desire to participate personally in the production of the intrinsically good. A sustainable economic life must account for both types of preferences (production and consumption) at the individual and cultural level.

* Production preferences can also be understood as stewardship preferences, meaning a desire to leave the world with more intrinsic good than it had when we arrived. A sustainable economic life must account in complex ways with the long-term time frames within which people make cost-benefit calculations, at the individual and cultural level.

* People are substantive reasoners who have the right and responsibility to discern the intrinsic good for themselves and participate personally in its production. A sustainable economic life must make this personal process of discernment and participation, not impersonal aggregate metrics, the goal of economic policy and discourse.

To conclude the book, the authors write:

In the long run, we are all dead—but life will go on when we are gone. We all know this, and in our economic lives we do not always behave as shallow, short-term consumers who don't care what we leave behind. If the discipline of economics wants to understand economic behavior as it really is, it must come to terms with the moral reality of human life. To ignore normative and teleological realities is to ignore the human, and to ignore the human is strange way to conduct a scientific study of how humans behave.

If we do not care what kind of world we are leaving, our economic systems will continue to be wracked by moral anxiety and the outrage it produces. Nationalists and socialists have their own reasons for wanting to block any movement toward a moral renewal that would restore confidence in our systems, but the rest of us should be seeking such a renewal with all the energy that the urgency of our situation demands. A return to economic vitality must begin with a restoration of confidence in our economic systems and practices, on the basis of a sustainable moral consensus for a pluralistic society.

We love economics. We love it because it matters—a lot. Tough new questions that overturn old certainties are already being asked in the discipline. We look forward to finding out what comes next.

Assessment

In short: teleology matters. Claar and Forster pack a lot into this book. My summary only scratches the surface. It is well worth the read for economists and those who think more broadly about economics and values. While I work to be conversant with economics and the history of economic thought, I am not an expert in either of these fields. People with better bona fides must evaluate the veracity of details presented in this book. Yet based on what I know, the overall argument rings true.

The history of how the Consumption paradigm came to dominate economics - with economists simultaneously fixating on consumption and claiming to be value-free - is helpful. There is no way to do social science without anthropological models and value assumptions. Economics is no exception. Homo economicus may be useful as a methodological tool for aspects of economic research, but it is insufficient as a model for grasping the complexities of human decision-making. I do not think that economics has so much rejected teleology, as it has uncritically embraced a teleology that is inadequate and subhuman.

I sense a discussion has been building on this topic in recent years. As with other social sciences, there seems to be an ongoing clash between those pursuing a grand unified theory and those who prefer more modest research into micro-level behavior from which larger models of human behavior can be derived. Unlike other social sciences, economics is unique in that "economics" and the concept of "the economy," a machine that can be directed toward particular ends by skillful elites, has gained considerable credibility in broader society. That likely makes challenges to macroeconomic models more difficult, but the importance of economics in policymaking also underscores the importance of getting underlying models of humanity right.

The book's most critical point is that "we are all dead." Human beings have a desire for the transcendent, to be a part of something meaningful, to pass on a legacy. Teleology matters. To use the authors' words, there is a production preference and a consumption preference. The Consumption paradigm is dehumanizing in that it robs people across economic strata of meaning-filled work. Resurrection of meaning in daily life will have to come from moral institutions outside of economics, but we cannot realize that ambition of understanding human decisions without economics. If economics is a study of human behavior, can it be said to be to accomplish its mission if it ignores the production preference aspects of human decision-making?

I appreciate the authors' advocacy for finding common ground on teleology across human cultures. Maybe a first step is for those of us invested in moral institutions to clarify our own values. As someone who has invested decades of service to Mainline Protestantism, it strikes me that there is a profound need for Christian theology to engage economics genuinely and respectfully and to move away from what all too often is a sophomoric and adversarial posture. Repeatedly, I encounter theologians and Christian thought leaders pontificating on economic issues, demonstrating they have not made the most rudimentary attempts to grasp basic economic concepts or represent those concepts faithfully. Theologism is all too common, but that is a conversation for another day. For now, we have this thought-provoking tome by Claar and Forster as a point of engagement. It is well worth the read.

 

ReFrame: Following Christ in the Modern Era

What does it mean to follow Christ in our era? That is the central question for Christians in any era, but it is particularly challenging today. Some suggest that our postmodern and post-Christendom context is creating a level of disruption in the Church not seen since the Reformation. I think that is likely true. So how do we follow Christ today?

A new curriculum called ReFrame attempts a response. It is “A powerful 10-week film-based exploration of what it means to follow Christ in the modern era,” produced by Regent College (Vancouver, British Columbia) in cooperation with The Washington Institute for Faith, Vocation & Culture. It is a truly exceptional series.

The curriculum features ten videos, each about thirty-nine minutes long. The first episode speaks of the increasing complexity and fragmentation of modern life. Our tendency is either to assimilate with our cultural context or to withdraw. We do not have a clear vision of how God might work in our midst. We do not know how to follow. The series uses the Emmaus Road story as a metaphor for being unable to see Christ among us until our vision is “reframed.” The second episode delves a little deeper into the specific challenges we face.

Beginning in the third episode, the series takes a narrative approach, moving from creation and fall to Israel, to Jesus the King, to new creation, to the Church and the Spirit, and so on, helping us see how our daily work and life is connected with God’s “story” at work in the world. The series concludes with guidance on how we might more authentically be disciples in light of our context and light of God’s unfolding narrative.

The format of each episode is built around the TED Talk concept. Half of the video is a speaker making an engaging presentation. There is a setup segment at the beginning and a wrap-up segment at the end. Interspersed throughout the video are commentary, testimony from biblical scholars and theologians, and vignettes by people from business, law, education, and science. People like Scot McKnight, Andy Crouch, Amy Sherman, and Eugene Peterson are among the contributors. Each episode is very well produced, moving along at an engaging pace.

I cannot emphasize enough how refreshing this curriculum is. I have served in various leadership capacities within the Presbyterian Church, USA, and various faith-based entities for most of my adult life. At some point in the late 1990s, I discerned that many Christians have difficulty seeing how their discipleship connects with daily life in meaningful ways. Church has become ancillary to “real life.” The Church is where to receive therapeutic care, get moral instruction for children, or join programs that offer opportunities for charity and the pursuit of justice outside of real life. The Church is not a place where we are formed for mission at the workplace and in the mundane affairs of the world. I am convinced that renewal in the Church will begin only when God’s mission and the whole of life are reintegrated.

Key to reintegration is reframing, yet I find precious few people in ecclesiastical structures and academic institutions who see the urgency and centrality of this need. When attempts are made, they usually proceed from a purely theological bent, without dialog with other disciplines like sociology, economics, science, education, and business. They lack winsome authenticity. ReFrame is a refreshing exception.

ReFrame acknowledges its Evangelical milieu, but I am convinced the curriculum would be well received across a wide range of denominational and theological communities. I am working out the details of doing multiple small groups with the series at Pine Ridge Presbyterian, starting at Lent. The idea is to buy a digital license and “flip the classroom.” Participants will watch each episode online at a password-protected site and then meet weekly to discuss and apply what was learned. The curriculum is a turnkey product complete with guides and promotional materials.

I have been following Regent College for at least fifteen years and am impressed with its innovation and quality of services. I know of few other institutions like Regent. The College offers classes and degrees that focus on the reintegration of life, and I am sure one purpose of the curriculum is to raise the profile of the academic and practical resources they provide. More power to them! I hope they are so successful that seminaries around the country will feel compelled to follow their lead. Maybe even the Presbyterians one day. ;-)

You definitely need to check out ReFrame. If you go to their site, you will find a two-minute promotional video. Episodes 1 and 5 are free to get a flavor of the experience. Thanks to the ReFrame folks for an exceptional product. I cannot wait to put it to use.

"Nothing is Free: The Price Only Business can Pay to Protect Free Markets" by Dave Geenens - Book Review

Order at Amazon: Nothing is Free: The Price Only Business can Pay to Protect Free Markets.

What is the purpose of business, particularly as it relates to the welfare of employees? Economists, business leaders, and theologians engage in endless debate about this topic. Regrettably, it tends to be two separate debates with economists and business leaders talking amongst themselves and theologians talking to each other. The first debate tends to be long on economic ramifications but without considerable reflection on what moral imperatives might be at play. The second debate tends to be long on moral reflection but too often within the context of (sometimes profound) economic illiteracy. Each community tends to view the other with suspicion if not hostility. Layer on top of this the political divide between libertarians who see only a minimal role for government intervention in business and liberals who believe a primary purpose of government is to intervene in economic affairs to ensure equitable outcomes, and you frequently end up with unproductive heated debates.

This inability to reflect both economically and morally on such questions leads to significant compartmentalization, so well described in John Knapp’s How the Church Fails Business People (and What Can Be Done About It. See my blog series on the book here.) Businesses frequently dissuade people from bringing their morals into the workplace. Pastors are reticent to approach the topic, except in platitudes, feeling inadequate to wrestle deeply with economic implications. Some businesspeople prefer not to hear about such topics at Church (either distrusting the pastor’s understanding or because they see the Church as a safe haven from the cares of the world), and most pastors are content to oblige. (And from my experience, those pastors who aggressively raise the topic frequently do so from a variety of deep ideological convictions that tend not to generate helpful dialog and reflection.) Yet we need “courageous conversations,” as Knapp calls them, where we genuinely explore how work and faith interact. But how do we begin such a conversation?

Dave Geenens, Director of the School of Business and Graduate Business Programs at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, has given us a wonderful gift in starting courageous conversations with his new book Nothing is Free: The Price Only Business can Pay to Protect Free Markets. This is NOT an academic treatise. It is a fable.

Geenens prefaces the story by noting:

One of the first lessons I learned in business was that nothing is free. Free freight? There is no such thing. That simply means that the cost of freight is covered by profit made elsewhere. By one, get one free? The cost of the second item is covered in the margin of the first one. Interest free? The cost of interest is absorbed in the profit made on the sale of the item. Nothing is free.”

The book introduces Rebecca Morton, founder of the franchise business Cupcakes and Coffee, based in Atchison, Kansas, just as the corporation is about to go public. Rebecca is wrestling with what this means for her and her business, particularly with the increased focus on increasing shareholder value. Then she meets Brother Mark, a Benedictine Monk. Throughout the book, we listen in on Rebecca’s conversations and inner reflections as she tries to make sense of it all.

Geenens draws on Roman Catholic social teaching to highlight the good that business is intended to do. At the risk of spoilers, if the business fails to live out its charge to care for the well-being of its employees, other institutions (namely government) must intervene to correct the inadequacy. The advantage business gains through the neglect of employees and failure to do the good it is intended to do isn’t free. The cost is increased government intervention.

What is the good that business is to do, and how do we achieve it? It is a complicated question that Geenens does not directly answer. Instead, he invites us to consider the four cardinal virtues: justice, wisdom, courage, and moderation. How might these inform us as we think about the intersection of work and faith? I won’t give away the whole story here. Geenens’ ideas are pulled together into one image at the end of the book, but you’ll need to buy the book to see what I mean.

The book is well-written and accessible to most audiences. (No degrees in economics or theology required.) I can see this as a wonderful selection for a church book club, any community of business professionals interested in integrating faith and work, and a text for college or graduate classes. Despite the explicitly Christian context of the story, I think the book has merit beyond discussion in religious communities as we think about business ethics. The book is a wonderful discussion starter … a great starting place for a courageous conversation. Buy your copy now at Amazon: Nothing is Free: The Price Only Business can Pay to Protect Free Markets.

What Critics Misunderstand about Abundance and Cooperation in Economics

Critics of economics, particularly in the world of religion, frequently charge that the discipline is grounded in a mindset of scarcity and competition versus what they champion: abundance and cooperation. The critique is considerably overblown.

First, economists recognize the world for what it is. Virtually nothing we use comes in usable form directly from nature. Everything we use requires human transformation from a less useful form into a more useful form. Economists study how human beings (individually and corporately) prioritize and decide what to make, how to make, and how to distribute. Economics is focused on how people create abundance out of scarcity, not on competing over a fixed set of existing goods, as many critics imagine economists advocating.

Second, economists mean something specific when they speak of competition. Timothy Taylor recently wrote in his post, Competition as a Form of Cooperation:

"… The kind of market competition that economists typically invoke is not about wolves competing in a pen full of sheep, nor is it competition between weeds to choke the flowerbed. The market-based competition envisioned in economics is disciplined by rules and reputations, and those who break the rules through fraud or theft or manipulation are clearly viewed as outside the shared process of competition. Market-based competition is closer in spirit to the interaction between Olympic figure-skaters, in which pressure from other competitors and from outside judges pushes individuals to strive for doing the old and familiar better, along with seeking out new innovations. Sure, the figure-skaters are trying their hardest to win. But in a broader sense, their process of training and coming together under agreed-upon rules is a deeply cooperative and shared enterprise."

Competition is not a creation of economists or capitalism. Competition is the natural order of the world God created. At any given moment, we have a fixed amount of resources available and a fixed number of daily hours. We cannot do everything at once and do not all share the same priorities on what to do next. Those resource limits and differing priorities put us in competition, not some economic theory. So the abundance-seeking economist might ask how we make more goods with fewer resources. How might we improve the productivity of each hour? These lead to a greater abundance of goods and choices.

Markets do not create competition. Markets are a human response to focus the competition God has placed in the world toward greater abundance and cooperation. They aren't perfect, but they have no parallel for many decisions that must constantly be made. Economics recognizes the existence of scarcity and competition while seeking a world of abundance and cooperation.

The "Immorality" of Economics

Alex Tabarrok writes today, The Moral Inversion of Economic Thinking:

In a delightful, short article on Economics and Morality, Timothy Taylor asks why economics has a reputation for leading to corruption:

Political science, history, psychology, sociology, and literature are often concerned with aggression, obsessiveness, selfishness, and cruelty, not to mention lust, sloth, greed, envy, pride, wrath, and gluttony. But no one seems to fear that students in these other disciplines are on the fast track to becoming sociopaths. Why is economics supposed to be so uniquely corrupting? ...

Arnold Kling gives one answer:

I think that economics is singled out for opprobrium because of the way that it challenges the intention heuristic. The intention heuristic says that if the intentions of an act are selfless and well-meaning, then the act is good. If the intentions are self-interested, then it is not good. ...

Both articles offer some important insights, but I think Tabarrok sums it up nicely:

... Standard morality, as Kling argues, often stops at intentions while economists are interested in consequences. Consequentialist philosophers also look at consequences but economists have the tools to trace interactions as they sort themselves into an equilibrium. Equilibrium outcomes may be very far from intentions. As a result, we find that economists often places themselves and their discipline in opposition to standard morality.

Two thoughts. First, many economists routinely assume that growth and efficiency take priority in almost all circumstances. So it isn't always true that everything comes down to economists offering value-free analysis of any given topic.

Second, with the above caveat, this inattention to consequences is what is maddening with so many moralists. When an economist demonstrates that a good intention doesn't have the desired outcome, the economist is branded as immoral or guilty of economism. Theologians are fond of noting that the Bible says more about economic issues than any other topic, yet very few have ever studied any economics. Theologism is pervasive, and for that reason, the church finds itself ineffectual in shaping the culture.

The Ancient Near East and Genesis 2: Seven Minute Seminary

Some fascinating insight into the imagery of Genesis 2.

 

The Value of a Person Versus the Value of Labor (Part 1)

(Part 2) (Part 3) (Part 4) (Index)

On what basis should people be compensated for their work? Economists say the value of labor is a function of supply and demand. Wages should correspond to the economic value of work. Theologians often object. (Note: We are all theologians, but here I'm referring to those formally educated in theology.) They say it dehumanizes people. People are not faceless cogs in a machine to be differentially valued based on their economic contribution. Everyone is equal in God's eyes. Income and wealth should be shared equitably.

What do you think? How do we sort this out? Is one right and the other wrong? My short answer is that human beings are created in the image of God. We have intrinsic value that transcends any instrumental purpose we might serve. The goods we produce do not have intrinsic value. Value is set by the interaction of a community's subjective desire for a good and the good's objective availability with an hour of labor. God sets the value of people, while the community sets the value of particular types of labor. The value of a person's labor is not an indicator of a person's intrinsic value. And that leads to some important theological and economic challenges. Let us unpack this.

Humans are unique. We have a hybrid existence. On one side, we are like creation and unlike God. We are material beings. We share much in common with other mammals. We have bodies subject to the laws of thermodynamics, just like the rest of the material world.

On the other side, we are like God and unlike creation. We are spiritual beings. We have the ability to love, to see beauty, to reason, to create, and to discern morality and meaning. We are meant for eternal life.

We are a body and spirit fusion. These two realities must be held together. We are not spirits inside of bodies. Ultimately, we believe in "the bodily resurrection," not transformation into spirits. In the language of Genesis 1:27, we are the image of God … eikons … in the created order. Not eikons in the sense of lifeless statues, but rather as God's agents, discerning and acting in ways so integrated with God that God's character and purpose are evidenced through us.

As agents, we have a mission. Genesis 1 and 2 give us the grand stories of creation that highlight that mission, but we often seem to miss the point due to our preoccupation with what these stories might say about origins. I'm persuaded that origin is not the driving subject of these stories. These stories aim to articulate God's sovereignty and our mission.

I think analogy is the best way to understand Genesis 1 and 2. Imagine creating a garden in your backyard. There are two phases. First, we take a plot of ground that is "formless and void" of the vision we have in mind. We remove rocks and weeds. We loosen the soil. We might add some fertilizer. We plant some seeds. Maybe we put a protective border around the garden and a fence to keep animals out. Having done so, we are done with the first phase, and we "rest" from "creating" the garden. But the garden is not done.

In the second phase, the garden must be continually weeded. The fence must be monitored and repaired as needed. Plants must be protected from hard freezes or hail. There will be occasional watering. Some plants may need regular pruning, and others will yield fruit that needs to be harvested periodically. Only when the garden has come to full flourishing can we say the garden is complete.

Genesis 1 and 2 are phase one of God's garden project. When God is finished creating, Genesis says God rested. Phase 1 was done. Now it was time to enjoy bringing it to fullness. In keeping with this narrative, Hebrews 4:1-11 says that God has been living in this seventh day of rest since creation. But this second phase of work is not work God has chosen to do alone.

At the end of the sixth day of creation, God creates eikons of God's self and gives them the mission of exercising dominion over creation. Despite various perversions of "dominion" as a right to do as you please, the idea here is that human beings are God's agents participating with God in realizing God's vision. I will not unpack this all here, but in view is humanity as God's vice-regents over creation and creation as God's temple in which we serve as priests. Human beings are intended for loving communion with God as they and God go about bringing "the garden" to its full potential.

Now I do not understand the early chapters of Genesis to correspond to historical events. They are stories that relate profound truths about God's vision and mission and humanity's role in that vision and mission. In short, God is sovereign over creation, and human beings are God's image-bearing agents in the world, participating with God and each other to realize God's ends. Genesis 3 and onward reveal humanity's sin and failure to embrace this mission. The biblical narrative is the story of God's redemption and reclamation of that vision, even as God continues to "work the garden" and bring us into that work. Revelation records that in the end, "You have made them [redeemed humanity] to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God, and they will reign on the earth." (Rev 5:10) Priests and vice-regents.

Let us return to the question of value. Value is subjective. Nothing has value without someone to do the valuing. This is true in all cases but one. God alone has intrinsic value. No one can set God's value. "There is one God who is father of all, over all, through all and within all." (Eph. 4:6) All value ultimately extends from God.

The biblical narrative tells us that God values creation, but humanity is valued in a way that is apart from the rest of creation. Human beings are God's image bearers, springing forth from the love and communion of the Trinity. Human beings have immeasurable value in God's eyes. Because God values human beings, we have intrinsic value, by extension. God intends that human beings, individually and corporately, should thrive. Consequently, the measure of a shalom-filled community is one where all members thrive together. All human beings are precious in God's eyes. As Christians thinking theologically and economically, a key end must be a community where all have resources and opportunities to thrive. Sharing in material abundance is a component of that vision. But it is not the only component. … 

(Part 2) (Part 3) (Part 4)

Science and Technology Links

1.The Drinkable Book - Water is Life. An innovative approach to create more drinkable water.

2. TED: Are insects the future of food?: Megan Miller at TEDxManhattan

3. Eco-Business: In future, clothes could be made from sugar

Researchers at the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN) have discovered a new chemical process that can convert adipic acid directly from sugar.

Adipic acid is an important chemical used to produce nylon for apparel and other everyday products like carpets, ropes and toothbrush bristles.

Commercially, adipic acid is produced from petroleum-based chemicals through the nitric acid oxidation process, which emits large amounts of nitrous oxides, a major greenhouse gas that causes global warming. ...

4. Business Insider: Want To Make $1 Billion? Just Solve One Of These Huge Tech Problems

5. Huffington Post: 11 Ways Technology Has Changed Since We Were Kids

6. Pew Internet: U.S. Views of Technology and the Future

7. Real Clear Technology: We Say We're Optimistic About the Future, But Don't Want Anything to Do With Future Innovations

... What's interesting about the Pew poll is that while the survey reported a general optimism about the trajectory of technological development over the next 50 years (59 percent said it would be positive vs. just 30 percent who felt it would be negative) very few specific technological breakthroughs seemed either possible to the general public, or desirable. In fact, just lab-grown organs and computer-generated art seemed both possible and desirable.

By contrast, here are the technologies we don't think are likely or aren't interested in if they do come to pass: ...

8. Huffington Post: Disrupting the World Now: Technology That Will Change Your Life

Can you imagine life without the Internet?

There are equally revolutionary technologies that are emerging today. When we look back 20 years from now, what things will be impossible to imagine living without?

Here are a few technologies to follow as our advancement continues to accelerate: ...

9. Business Insider: How A Chinese Company 3-D Printed 10 Houses In A Day

10. Real Clear Technology: 3D Printing Possibilities Are Beautiful but Not Limitless

... There’s no doubting that these technologies are exciting but the hype is leading us to think our future homes will all feature machines suspiciously similar to the Replicator in Star Trek, probably alongside a robotic housemaid and hoverboard.

The use of 3D printers in industry will definitely continue to grow, and will have a major (if often unnoticed) impact on our consumer choice but those of us who don’t make things for a living will not suddenly become digital artisans. ...

11. Wired: A 3-D Printing Startup’s Plan to Bring Manufacturing Back to Cities

"... But according to founder and CEO Peter Weijmarshausen, the longterm goal for the New York City-based outfit is to bring manufacturing back to America’s cities.

“We believe manufacturing should be local,” Weijmarshausen said on stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York on Wednesday. “Our view is, over time, more and more Shapeway factories will appear in places all over the world, and in those places, not only will we get products to you faster and at a lower cost, but we’ll have lower impact on the environment for transportation. ...”

12. Conversable Economist: When Technology Spreads Slowly

...But in the real world, new technologies often take time to diffuse. They note that surveys of dozens of new technologies often find that it takes 15-30 years for a new technology to go from 10% to 90% of the potential market. But some major inventions take longer.

Here's how the tractor slowly displaced horses and mules in the U.S. agricultural sector from 1910 to 1960. Horses and mules, shown by the black dashed line and measured on the right-hand axis, declined from about 26 million in 1920 to about 3 million by 1960. Conversely, the number of tractors, shown by the blue solid line, rose from essentially zero in 1910 to 4.5 million by 1960. ...

Also this ...

13. Atlantic: America's Coming Manufacturing Revolution

... But the doomsayers often fail to see the ways in which America is gaining rather than losing global influence. And nowhere is this truer than the manufacturing sector. The combination of lower energy prices, innovative information technologies, and advances in robotics and materials science are powering a manufacturing revolution that will reinvigorate the U.S. economy and make many of its industrial sectors the most competitive in the world. ...

14. Mashable: Scientists Discover Clever Trick Ancient Egyptians Used to Build Pyramids

15. Huffington Post: How Innovation and Technology Are Shaping Libraries of Today

...Technology has changed the expectations of library patrons; people today expect to be able to find and access information from wherever they are. This is why so many public library systems across the country have increased both computers for use inside the library as well as mobile and online access to e-books, audio books, research databases and archives. In 2010, nearly 300 million Americans used library services including onsite computers and onsite Wi-Fi to check out books, to attend workshops, and to consult with reference librarians.

Libraries are now hubs of technology with over 85 percent offering wireless internet services, and many offering state-of-the-art computers for use. But technology available to patrons does not stop there. Surveys show that currently 12 percent of academic libraries have pre-loaded E-reading devices in circulation that patrons can check out. Another 26 percent of academic libraries are considering adding this service. New (even book-free) libraries are popping up around the country, employing technology in ways most never envisioned:

• GPS apps that help locate material inside the library
• Mobile apps that allow patrons to access library services
• Access to 3-D printers, binding services
• Book delivery robots ...

16. Slate: What Will Become of the Library?

How it will evolve as the world goes digital. ...

17. Huffington Post: Battling Psychics and Ghosts: The Need for Scientific Skepticism

... College and university students, from freshmen to seniors, have asked me similar questions, along with queries about aliens, ghosts, and a wide variety of New Age and alternative health and psychological treatments. Through countless questions on these topics, I've realized the need to teach scientific skepticism, and that using examples of pseudoscience -- claims that appear to be scientific but are not -- can be an invaluable resource for helping students become discerning consumers of real-world claims. ...

18. AP: AP Survey On Faith And Science Reveals That Science Is Often Trumped By Religious Belief

WASHINGTON (RNS) Believers don’t buy the Big Bang, God-less evolution or a human responsibility for global warming. Actually, neither do many Americans.

But a new survey by The Associated Press found that religious identity — particularly evangelical Protestant — was one of the sharpest indicators of skepticism toward key issues in science. ...

18. The Big Think: When Evidence Backfires

Don't read this blog post. Definitely don't read it to the end. Didn't I tell you not to read this blog post? You're still doing it... We can laugh at our inherent ability to be contrary, but unfortunately something similar can happen when we give a human being scientific evidence that debunks misinformation. One of the most depressing paradoxes of science communication is that not only can misinformation often spread faster and wider than the truth (just take the ubersuccessful but often not so factual "uberfacts" or the success of the paragons of science misinformation Natural News if you need examples); but even worse, combating misinformation with evidence can often have the complete and utter opposite of the desired effect. This horrifying phenomenon known as the backfire effect was demonstrated once again recently by a study of the responses of parents to various different forms of evidence that vaccines are not dangerous. ...

19. Los Angeles Times: 'Nanobionics' aims to give plants superpowers

... Researchers at MIT have been experimenting with giving plants new powers by placing tiny carbon nanotubes in their chloroplasts — the tiny engine of the plant cell where photosynthesis takes place.

After much trial and error, their efforts have succeeded. Some of the altered plants produced in their lab have increased their photosynthetic activity by 30% compared with regular plants. Others were able to detect tiny traces of pollutants in the air.

And that's just the beginning. ...

20. BBC: Doctors implant lab-grown vagina

Four women have had new vaginas grown in the laboratory and implanted by doctors in the US. ...

21. Carpe Diem: Recommended reading for Earth Day: ‘Recycling is garbage’ from the NYTimes in 1996; it broke the record for hate mail

Economic Boom in Africa - Philip Jenkins

Christian Century: Economic Boom in Africa - Philip Jenkins

When I lecture on glo­bal Chris­tianity, I am sometimes asked whether, in retrospect, I would revise what I wrote many years ago in books like The Next Christendom. Us­u­ally my answer is no.

But in one critical area conditions are changing so quickly as to demand rethinking. Whereas I (and others) once presented Africa as a region of extreme poverty and deprivation, we now have to take account of economic development that in some regions is so rapid as to amount to a boom. We can only begin to outline the religious consequences. ...

... The main impact on Christian churches will like­ly fall into the category of “more of the same.” For some years now, older independent churches have faded in the face of competition from new de­nominations rooted in global Pentecostalism that emphasize the blessings of material prosperity. Some tailor their message to aspiring professional and entrepreneurial groups, which will become much more numerous in the coming decade. Charismatic mega­churches should boom.

Prosperity teachings never lack for critics. Nevertheless, such teachings usually in­clude important practical lessons for coping with the new globalized world—lessons, for example, in the responsible use of debt and credit. Latin American precedents suggest that these churches also provide a vital organizational focus for campaigns for social and political reform and civic improvement. Ex­pect more, rather than less, religious politics.

Other likely effects lie in the longer term. Increasingly, the demand for labor should draw more women into full-time paid employment, particularly in emerging service sectors. Expect to see more Western-style debates over issues of gender and sexuality, although framed strictly in terms of African traditions. What a pleasure it would be to see Africa’s churches en­during some of the familiar discontents of prosperity.

Interesting observations.

Faith and Business - Michael Jinkins

Huffington Post Business: Faith and Business - Michael Jinkins

The church has a knack for depreciating the vocations of the laity. Well, perhaps not all vocations of the laity. The church routinely blesses vocations like the helping professions and education, especially if they are in the not-for-profit realm. But the church is ambivalent, at best, when it comes to blessing the vocations of those folks whose business is, well, business. I find this troubling, since the overwhelming majority of Christians I know are working in the business world just making a living.

The problem the church has with business has as much to do with an ignorance of economics as a flawed theology of vocation. When pastors and theologians begin talking about economic matters, I often cringe, not only because of their lack of knowledge in the fields of financial and economic matters, but because of the thinness of the theological reflections. Usually such conversations reflect little more than the individual's biases dressed up in theological language to dress down someone else's interests. ...

Michael Jinkins is the president of Louisville Presbyterian Seminary. I can't tell you what an encouragement it is to hear a Presbyterian seminary president come forward and raise this issue. I have made the case in public and private for just this emphasis for nearly ten years as I have served the denomination at the national level. I have made the case that church renewal begins when people begin to see the connection between what they do in their daily lives and God's mission. I occasionally caught an ear here and there, but I largely experienced acute indifference. To hear the president of one of our seminaries acknowledge the deprecating (and I will add "demonizing" in some contexts) attitude toward people in business and lack of economic understanding is such an encouragement. Blessings on you, Dr. Jinkins, and may your tribe multiply among our denomination's hierarchy.

Jinkins mentions Presbyterian John Knapp's (now president of Hope College) How the Church Fails Businesspeople (and what can be done about it). I blogged through the book two years ago, both here and at Jesus Creed. The index is here.

If you are interested in a couple of books about basic economics from a Christian perspective, I would recommend Bulls, Bears and Golden Calves: Applying Christian Ethics in Economics, written by John Stapleford, a professor of mine when I was at Eastern University.

Also, Economics in Christian Perspective: Theory, Policy and Life Choices by Victor Claar and Robin Klay.

Does God Ordain Us to the Hardware Business?

I preached at Pine Ridge Presbyterian Church, in Kansas City, MO, on March 16, 2014. The sermon begins by wondering if it is appropriate to ordain people to the hardware business. The sermon text is Genesis 12:1-4, and the real issue is the ministry of work in everyday life. I think this is the first time I have ever preached on this topic. See what you think.

PRPC Mar 16 2014 from Jay Waddell on Vimeo.

Revisiting Wealth - Bob Lupton

This is from Bob Lupton, FCS Urban Ministries, in the Urban Perspectives newsletter. He is always thought-provoking. This issue was especially good! (Note: Urban Perspectives allows copying these articles if attribution is given.)

Revisiting Wealth

Wealth. A sign of God’s favor. At least that’s how it was viewed in Old Testament times. Wealth was equated with prominence, influence, leadership, and yes, even righteousness. Consider Job and Abraham. Oh yes, there were evil and corrupt rich men to be sure. The prophets took them on. But generally riches were seen as evidence of God’s blessing. That’s why the disciples were so puzzled by Jesus’ pronouncement that it was harder for a rich man to enter the Kingdom than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. “Well who can get in, if not the wealthy?!” they questioned. It was clear that they viewed wealth like most other devout Jews – as a sign of God’s favor. Their Teacher was casting an entirely new (and dubious) light on the nature of riches.

Money, power, prestige – these would no longer be the measures of prominence in this Kingdom Jesus was introducing. Meekness, humility, compassion – these would become the defining attributes of greatness. Rich people could certainly join, He said, but this new order of things would be difficult for them – difficult to divest their personal assets rather than contine to accumulate more, difficult to subordinate their privileged status to those of lesser social standing, difficult to place their security in God rather than in their wealth. It would not be impossible, He said, just difficult. Matthew the tax collector was case in point, and of course the very wealthy Zacchaeus. Luke the physician was another. But by and large the wealthy were relegated to lower standing in the pecking order of the Kingdom. It was all upside down – the first being last and the last first. Big change from Old Testament to New.

And so the value of being wealthy was turned on its ear. The well-off became suspect. It was a rich man who treated poor Lazarus poorly and was condemned to eternal damnation. A rich young ruler too tied to his wealth to become a follower. A proud rich man in the Temple whose offering was unacceptable. A successful farmer who took early retirement who was declared “a fool.”  Deceitful Ananias and Sapphira, tragic examples of rich folk who held out on God. Wealth became associated with self-indulgence, with mercilessness, with arrogance, with fraudulence. As a matter of fact, one is hard pressed to find a single reference in the New Testament affirming wealth as God’s blessing. Warnings, yes, but no recognition of its essential role in Shalom.

But just behind the scenes, unmentioned but clearly present, were wealthy supporters of this Kingdom. Zacchaeus was still one of the richest men in Jericho even after he made restitution and gave half his money to the poor. And what about Matthew’s tax business and Luke’s medical practice? And the women of means who supported the Messiah campaign? And members of the early church that sold property to underwrite the church budget? Oh yes, wealth was there alright. It’s just that generosity and self-sacrifice and living by faith were the themes that got the sermon coverage.

But then, how could it be any different? Everybody in the early church was readying for the eminent return of the Messiah. Everyone was on a short-term schedule. Don’t even get married, the apostle Paul urged. Put all your energy into preparedness for the second coming. But Christ didn’t return as expected. (Not yet.)  And so in time everybody began settling into a new normal of church and community life, some thriving, others surviving. The themes of generosity, self-sacrifice and living by faith imbedded themselves in the culture of the church. Wealth remained suspect. The apostle James made quite sure that the rich were not shown deference.

And so the issue churns. Those who create wealth continue to receive the warnings while those modest souls who live off the benefits of the economy that wealth-producers create receive the affirmation. John Coors, a very wealthy and very devout Christian, calls it an “industry of making the rich feel guilty.”  Billionaire Robert Kern, who loves the church but endures the judgment, has allocated a large portion of his estate to educating ministers in the fundamentals of how the economy works.

“Give it all away,” Jesus said. Even your second coat. Don’t concern yourself about tomorrow. Budgeting?   Trust a miracle. Hmm. Does the One who holds the economies of the world in his hand not realize that thoughtful planning and responsible investing are essential for stable societies? Was it not He who gave the promise of prosperity to Israel if they would keep His commands? Was He not the One who warned Joseph in a dream about seven years of famine that would befall Egypt, and positioned him to plan ahead during seven years of plenty? How then are we to understand this radical “take-no-thought-for-tomorrow” departure from divinely guided resource management?

He came to fulfill the law, not do away with it, He said. Don’t abandon the God-given teachings and principles of the past – take them to a deeper level. The blessing of wealth is meant for the Shalom of the entire community, not to be hoarded for personal sumptuousness. Managed well, it provides a stable lifestyle for a workforce and their families, stimulates ancillary enterprises, contributes to the prosperity of the whole village or region. No, He did not come to destroy Shalom but to inspire it. Admittedly, He did use some highly provocative words and actions to shake up a religious culture that was misusing wealth to amass personal power, privilege and possessions. Scattering stacks of money-changers’ cash all over the Temple portico floor was a bit extreme perhaps. But sometimes dramatic intervention is required when greed and self-indulgence become acceptable norms within the Temple community. And He certainly did that!

But perhaps the time has come to bring theological balance back to our understanding of wealth. 2000 years of cautions for those who have the gift of wealth creation may be an adequate length of time to make the point that mammon is seductive, that one’s heart must be carefully guarded against its enticements. At a time when the entire world is awakening to the reality that healthy economic systems are fundamental to the elimination of extreme poverty, perhaps this is a moment for resourced members of the Western church – who have unparalleled capacity to create profitable businesses – to step forward. Perhaps this is the time when the church begins to see itself as more than a purveyor of compassionate service, but as a catalyst of just and fruitful economies.   Might this be a turning point when the wealthiest church in history awakens to the reality that their job creators are the very ones gifted by God to bring economic wholeness to struggling souls too long resigned to unending poverty?

Should Christians Really Stop Saying This?

A Facebook friend linked this article this week, The One Thing Christians Should Stop Saying. I get the gist of what he is saying, but I also have reservations. He is a businessperson and tells of how a friend asked how his business was going. He answered with his usual response:

"Definitely feeling blessed. Last year was the best year yet for my business. And it looks like this year will be just as busy."

But on further reflection, he has concluded that it is wrong for him to say that. Two reasons:

... First, when I say that my material fortune is the result of God's blessing, it reduces The Almighty to some sort of sky-bound, wish-granting fairy who spends his days randomly bestowing cars and cash upon his followers. I can't help but draw parallels to how I handed out M&M's to my own kids when they followed my directions and chose to poop in the toilet rather than in their pants. Sure, God wants us to continually seek His will, and it's for our own good. But positive reinforcement?

God is not a behavioral psychologist.

Second, and more importantly, calling myself blessed because of material good fortune is just plain wrong. For starters, it can be offensive to the hundreds of millions of Christians in the world who live on less than $10 per day. You read that right. Hundreds of millions who receive a single-digit dollar "blessing" per day. ...

He goes on to talk about the Beatitudes and talks about how it is the poor and the marginalized who are described as blessed. He concludes by noting:

My blessing is this. I know a God who gives hope to the hopeless. I know a God who loves the unlovable. I know a God who comforts the sorrowful. And I know a God who has planted this same power within me. Within all of us.

And for this blessing, may our response always be,

"Use me."

Since I had this conversation, my new response is simply, "I'm grateful." Would love to hear your thoughts.

There is a lot of truth in this. I find myself strongly identifying with his observations ... and yet ...

What about passages like Deut 8:17-19:

"17 Do not say to yourself, "My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth." 18 But remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, so that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your ancestors, as he is doing today." NRSV

I have been in small groups with countless businesspeople and entrepreneurs. What I hear from so many of them is profound gratitude for the opportunity to express what they understand as a God-given gift for creativity. They feel grateful because they can benefit their customers, workers, families, and, yes, themselves. When I hear them talk about being blessed, I don't hear them saying, "I did all the right stuff, now see how God rewarded me." Most are intensely aware of their shortcomings and make endless mistakes, yet they are still here in their businesses. They sense God's presence with them in their work, but I don't get the sense that they think that those whose businesses fail do so because of a lack of God's presence. They know people who have done everything seemingly right and don't make it. They feel blessed in the sense that they are where they are in God's grand scheme of things.

What I worry about is the compartmentalization of our faith and the business world. If the businessperson claims all credit for achieving success in creating a sustainable, profitable business, we chastise her for attributing success to herself alone. But if she talks about being blessed in her work (i.e., God had a hand in her success), then that also is taboo because she is saying God withheld blessing from someone else who didn't do well. In short, if you are in business, you are only entitled to have vague feelings of gratitude but not to see God as present in your daily life.

I'm not saying that the way "blessing" is used is without abuse. Someone in the article's comments section talked about "blessed to be a blessing" as a corrective, and I think that has merit. But I worry that the thinking in this article just drives a deeper wedge between faith and daily life. Maybe I read too much between the lines, but it seems that the thinking here is evidence of a deep ambivalence so much of the church has about business and the people who make their living there.

Any thoughts?

Religion Links

1. Business Insider: A Fascinating New Poll Shows That Americans Are Losing Faith In God

A new Harris Poll released today reveals that only 74% of Americans believe in God, an 8% decline since 2009.

Before today, U.S. adults had remained fairly consistent in their religious beliefs — 82% of U.S. respondents previously reported that they believed there was a God since 2005.

In another decline, only 54% of Americans are now "absolutely certain" in God's existence, a 12% decrease over the last decade. ...

2. Daily Mail: The Bible-ignorant [British] youngsters who can't tell Noah from Adam: Third of children didn't know Nativity story came from Holy Book

• One in three Britons didn't know where story of birth of Jesus could be read
• Some 54 per cent of children never read Bible stories by adults, study found
• Campaigners now fear the religion is in a state of permanent retreat

3. Christian Newswire: 92% of Americans Own a Bible but Only 16% Read it Daily

4. Religion News Service: Respect for clergy drops, but among Republicans, not so much

(RNS) Clergy used to rank near the top in polls asking Americans to rate the honesty and ethics of people in various professions. This year, for the first time since Gallup began asking the question in 1977, fewer than half of those polled said clergy have "high" or "very high" moral standards.

But opinions on clergy differed markedly by party, with Republicans viewing them far more favorably than Democrats.

Overall, 47 percent of respondents to the survey gave clergy "high" or "very high" ratings, a sharp drop in confidence from the 67 percent of Americans who viewed them this way in 1985.

Among Republicans, 63 percent gave clergy one of the two top ratings for ethics, compared with 40 percent of Democrats. ...

5. Economist: All about Adam

A furious—and political—debate about the origins of mankind ...

... A quest for certainty is an American tradition. Old World believers often inherit religion passively, like a cultural artefact. Americans, an individualistic bunch, are more likely to switch churches or preachers until they find a creed that makes sense to them. They admire fundamental texts (the constitution, for example) that plain citizens may parse for immutable truths.

At the same time, the literalist faith is in crisis. Young Americans are walking away from the stern denominations that have held such sway over post-war American life, from Billy Graham's crusades to the rise of the religious right. After they hit 18, half of evangelical youngsters lose their faith; entering a public university is especially perilous. As a generation, millennials (those born between the early 1980s and 2000s), are unimpressed by organised anything, let alone organised religion. Many young adults told the Barna Group, an evangelical research outfit, that they felt stifled by elders who demonised secular America. Young Christians are more accepting of gay rights than their elders. In a challenge to creationists, a quarter of young adults told Barna's study that their churches were "anti-science".

The seeming paradox of a strong faith in crisis is explained by rigidity: that which cannot bend may break instead. ...

6. The Dish: The Language Of Certainty In Atheism

 

7. Faith & Leadership: Mainline Protestants and disruptive innovation

Mainline Protestants can still have an exciting and life-giving future -- if they learn the lessons of disruptive innovation from the steel industry and other organizations, say three Christian institutional leaders. ...

8. Call & Response Blog: Denominational leaders as bridge-builders

... The image of a bridge was one powerful expression of the issues they face now and anticipate facing in the future. But what most struck me were the ways in which, rather than despairing of their bridging roles, these leaders accepted the challenges and articulated the issues with clarity and grace.

First, they understood themselves as being "bridgers" who manage polarity and tension between people, issues or factions in the denomination. ...

 ... Second, these leaders saw their role as being a bridge to support systems and resources for congregations that are disbursed. ...

... Third, guest Marlon Hall, Houston pastor, filmmaker and leader of the Awakenings Movement, helped the gathered denominational leaders think about the ways in which they are a bridge between "the powerful and the engaged," between the status quo and disruptive innovation. ...

9. Religion News Service: Why evangelicalism needs controversies like Duck Dynasty

10. Pew Forum: Religious Hostilities Reach Six-Year High

11. Associated Press: Evangelicals mass in Peru amid boom

... Evangelicals have seen the most growth in Lima's teeming working class districts but more and more converts are coming from Peru's highlands thanks to proselytizing radio stations emerging in recent years in the region, said Rev. Juan Carlos Perez, a local leader of the Movimiento Misionero Mundial church. ...

... Peru and its capital remain bastions of Roman Catholicism. About three in four Peruvians identify themselves as Catholics. But evangelicals are on the rise, jumping from 5.2 percent of the population in 1981 to 12.5 percent in 2007, the last year for which government census figures are available.

Perez claims evangelicals now account for at least 20 percent of Peru's 30 million people, which would give it one of Latin America's highest growth rates. ...

12. Time: It's Social Ties—Not Religion—That Makes the Faithful Give to Charity

... Having found that religion and charity go hand-in-hand, Robert Putnam and I sought to understand why.  The answer might surprise you. We initially thought that religious beliefs must foster a sense of charity—whether inspiration from biblical stories like the Good Samaritan or, perhaps, a fear of God's judgment for not acting charitably. However, we could find no evidence linking people's theological beliefs and their rate of giving—which also helps to explain why the "religion effect" varies little across different religions. The rates for charitable giving according to the Jumpstart survey are: 61 percent of Black Protestants; 64 % of Evangelical Protestants; 67 % of Mainline Protestants, 68 % of Roman Catholics, and 76 % of Jews. By contrast, only 46 % of the not religiously affiliated made any charitable giving.

Rather than religious beliefs, we found that the "secret ingredient" for charitable giving among religious Americans is the social networks formed within religious congregations. The more friends someone has within a religious congregation, the more likely that person is to give time, money, or both, to charitable causes. In fact, even non-religious people who have friends within a religious congregation (typically, because their spouse is a believer) are highly charitable—more so than strong believers who have few social ties within a congregation. ...

13. Christianity Today: Who Owns the Pastor's Sermon?

Church or pastor? When sermons become books that make millions in royalties, the answer is important.

Spoiler: Copyright law favors churches.

14. Jesus Creed: Who "attended" those earliest churches?

On the basis of a new approach at looking how to discern the social makeup of the earliest Christian house churches, one based more on housing space occupied than on ideal social types, Peter Oakes has offered to us a new way of thinking more realistically and concretely about who was in the earliest house churches. His book is called Reading Romans in Pompeii. ...

... The earliest churches, then, are not made up of pietists who wanted to study the Bible but ordinary Romans from all sorts of backgrounds, needs, yearnings, and connections — each bringing to the table different ears for the gospel. ...

... Undoubtedly, one the best books on Paul/Romans I've read in a long, long time. Oakes combines judicious historical sensitivities with solid exegetical insight, all wrapped into a proper caution that is not always observed among those who use social evidence.

15. The Bible and Culture: Social Description in Early Christianity

Here is an excellent post from Larry Hurtado reminding us that it is wrong to say that early Christianity was largely made up of impoverished slaves, women, minors, and the rural poor. This, is a complete myth. See below. ...

... Here's a sample from Meeks's now-classic work, The First Urban Christians (pp. 72-73): "the most active and prominent members of Paul's circle are people of high status inconsistency . . . They are upwardly mobile, their achieved status is higher than their attributed status." That is, e.g., people involved in trade, business, etc., whose energy and abilities enabled them to acquire a social status that they didn't inherit or have by way of being born into a traditional elite class.

There's much, much more to note. But this will do, hopefully, to steer interested readers toward a more accurate, less simplistic, view of the social makeup of the earliest circles of Christian believers.

16. Why are the virgin birth, empty tomb and resurrection controversial? - N. T. Wright

17. Euangelion: Sin and Death in Eastern Orthodox Theology

I introduced a nice book about Introducing Eastern Orthodox Theology by Andrew Louth. In the first post I was describing the Eastern tradition's view of sin, death and destruction. The two most important elements of this perspective I want to highlight now. ...

... Thus, the most significant consequence of the Fall in light of the resurrection is the presence of death. So, according to Louth, it is Christ's conquest of death in his resurrection means that death rather than sin is central to the Orthodox understanding of the consequence of Adam's disobedience (70). ...

... Second, Louth presents the story of Adam is more the story of "everyman" than a story of the "first man". While not denying the latter, he says the Father's were interested in the former. In this sense the story is mythical. ...

... The more I think about it, I'm beginning to find these to be a more satisfying explanation than my inherited tradition. ...

Me too.

18. BioLogos: Long Life Spans in Genesis

... There are 30 age numbers we can get from Genesis chapter 5—three numbers for each of ten patriarchs: the age when a son was born, the number of years the patriarch lived after the son was born, and the total number of years the patriarch lived. For example, "When Adam had lived 130 years, he became the father of… Seth. The days of Adam after he became the father of Seth were 800 years… Thus all the days that Adam lived were 930 years" (Genesis 5:3-5). We get similar accounts of Seth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech, and Noah (though for Noah we have to go to Genesis 9:29 to see how old he was when he died).

The first thing more careful observation reveals about these 30 numbers is that all of them end with the digits 0, 2, 5, 7, or 9. You might not think that is too remarkable until you realize that it eliminates half of the possible numbers. It is like seeing a list of 30 numbers that are all even. We wouldn't think that was a random distribution of numbers. In fact, the odds of getting all thirty numbers to end with just these "approved" digits in a random distribution of ages are about one in a hundred million.[1] That should make us suspicious that Genesis 5 is merely giving a historical report. Something else must be going on here. ...

19. The Cultural Cognition Project - Yale Law School: Have Republicans changed views on evolution? Or have creationists changed party? Pew's (half-released) numbers don't add up ... 

... Right away when I heard about the Pew poll, I turned to the results to see what the explanation was for the interesting -- truly! -- "shift" in Republican view: Were Republicans changing their positions on creationism or creationists changing their party allegiance?

And right away I ran into this logical inconsistency.

Surely, someone will clear this up, I thought.  

But no.  

Just the same predictable, boring "ha ha ha ha!" reaction.

Why let something as silly as logic get in the way of an opportunity to pound one's tribal chest & join in a unifying, polarizing group howl?

20. Huffington Post: Three Reasons Why Evolution Will Never Convince a Creationist

1) Evolution is not, strictly speaking, mentioned in the Bible, so a Creationist is not inclined to trust it. ...

2) People tend to assume that the two realms of science and faith must be in opposition to one another, or that when one is "right" on an issue the other cannot hold any merit in the conversation. ...

3) Starting from the "evolution" perspective is always taken to be challenging what is found in Genesis 1-3. Perhaps this seems obvious to you. But if that is where a person representing evolution starts, she or he has lost the Creationist from the get-go.

None of this way of approaching the conversation addresses the content of the Bible and the type of writings we find in them. This is, it seems to me, the central issue.

21. Spirit, Science, and Metaphysics: Scientists Claim That Quantum Theory Proves Consciousness Moves To Another Universe At Death

A book titled "Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the Nature of the Universe "has stirred up the Internet, because it contained a notion that life does not end when the body dies, and it can last forever. The author of this publication, scientist Dr. Robert Lanza who was voted the 3rd most important scientist alive by the NY Times, has no doubts that this is possible. - See more at: http://www.spiritscienceandmetaphysics.com/scientists-claim-that-quantum-theory-proves-consciousness-moves-to-another-universe-at-death/#sthash.m65dCbI8.dpuf

A book titled "Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the Nature of the Universe" has stirred up the Internet, because it contained a notion that life does not end when the body dies, and it can last forever. The author of this publication, scientist Dr. Robert Lanza who was voted the 3rd most important scientist alive by the NY Times, has no doubts that this is possible. ...

Proof Jesus Was Not a Capitalist: The Richest 1 Percent Own Half the World's Wealth - My Response

Rev. Dr. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite has a post at the Huffington Post today titled Proof Jesus Was Not a Capitalist: The Richest 1 Percent Own Half the World's Wealth. Here is my response.

She writes:

...Biblically speaking, probably not. As Jesus warned, you have to choose. Either money rules you, or your highest values rule you. There's no middle ground. "No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money." (Luke 16:13)

Jesus was not a capitalist.

God's rules on economics, as articulated both by the prophets and Jesus of Nazareth, are strikingly clear. Not small concentrations of great wealth and the vast majority of people in poverty, but 'each under their own vine and fig tree, living without fear.' (Micah 4:4) Jesus announces his ministry as "good news to the poor" (Luke 4:18), that is, the "Jubilee," the really radical redistributive economic strategy of ancient Israel.

So, is it likely the leaders gathered at the World Economic Forum in Davos serve that vision, a vision of a reasonable abundance shared by all, or are they in service to the vast accumulated wealth of the 1 percent? Is it going to be possible for people at that meeting to enact policies that start to close this disastrous economic gulf between the rich and the poor? ...

First, advanced agrarian societies of the Near East and Rome are the contexts of the Bible (Hebrew and Christian Testaments.) To the limited degree they thought in macroeconomic terms, the economy was a zero-sum game. Land and labor were the two inputs for production. Both were relatively fixed. There was little you could do to alter land productivity, and one person's labor was not substantially different from another's. Consequently, with variable productivity off the table, economics was constrained to considerations of consumption and distribution. Both personal and societal abundance was cyclical, and sharing the fixed pie was essential for community survival.

The great divergence of the past two centuries is the realization that productivity can be radically altered. Productivity can be altered radically by applying technology, energy, exchange, stable institutions, and improving human capital. But these changes have included concentrating wealth into productive assets and assuming larger risks to achieve greater productivity effectively. We live in a different world from advanced agrarian societies, and applying morals from their context directly to ours is useless.

Second, the Jubilee was categorically not a "radical redistributive economic strategy." Land was to revert to its perpetual owners every 50 years. Jubilee stated that if someone needed to "sell" their land, the price would be determined based on the number of crops gathered between the "sale" date and the next Jubilee. Then the land would revert to the perpetual owner. In other words, it was a lease. A person could "sell" their labor under the same conditions. These provisions only applied to agricultural land and had nothing to do with non-agricultural land or other private property. Significantly, it ensured that everyone had access to at least a minimal level of capital (land and labor) to provide for themselves and to produce goods for exchange, living individually and corporately as God's stewards. That has interesting theological implications for economics, but it was not radical redistribution.

Third, from where does abundance come? Apart from air and sunlight, name one thing humans use that does not require human action to transform matter, energy, and data from a less useful form to a more useful form. Absent human action, there is near absolute scarcity of the things that humanity uses. If we each had to provide for ourselves and our families alone, our days would be precarious, doing little else but hunting and gathering our way through life. But we achieve high productivity levels through specialization, technology, the concentration of wealth in productive enterprises, and trade (i.e., capitalism), resulting in unprecedented abundance. Had Jesus known that productivity could be radically altered, I suspect he may have offered different guidance (and I don't mean a blanket blessing of the American economic system.)

Fourth, just what is the negative impact of inequality that should give us pause? The article doesn't say, but it is strongly implied: If wealth is becoming concentrated at the top, then it must be that it is being taken from others, making them poor (1% are wealthy while 99% are in poverty) ... the rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer. She is not alone in this thinking. A recent survey of Americans showed that 66% of respondents think that the proportion of the global population living in poverty has doubled in the past twenty years and another 29% think there has been no change (total of 95%), when in fact the proportion has been halved:

Source: Brookings

Furthermore, the number of well-paying jobs is expanding around the world. Life expectancy at birth, the most holistic measure of human well-being, is now at seventy years and closing in on the eighty-year mark enjoyed by the wealthiest nations. Studies show that inequality within nations is increasing, but inequality between nations is falling.

Now none of this is to say that rising inequality is good or bad. We have to be specific about what metric we use. If the metric is that inequality means more poverty and is therefore bad, then the assertion that inequality is "bad" isn't true. People are not getting poorer. That doesn't mean inequality isn't problematic for other reasons, but we must be specific about what we are tackling.

Finally,

"Unregulated market capitalism has only one master, and that is money. And that is why 85 people control half the wealth of the whole world."

Dr. Thistlethwaite, if you identify one nation on the face of the earth with "unregulated market capitalism," I will write you a check for $1,000 here and now. They don't exist! This issue is not unregulated market capitalism but corporatism. If there is a governance problem, it is that the biggest corporate entities and government have joined together to stack things in favor of their mutual interests over and against market forces that might threaten them. That is corporatist business capitalism and antithetical to market capitalism. Furthermore, economists have not reached a consensus on why there has been an increasing concentration at the top, but the idea that it is summed up in "unregulated market capitalism" is just absurd.

With all that said, I'm not saying that growth in inequality isn't a problem and isn't worthy of theological and moral reflection. I am asking for a more responsible discussion.

I will also agree that change begins from the bottom up. Muhammad Yunus uses the image of a bonsai tree. The seed that grows into the tiny bonsai tree is the same seed that grows into the tall tree in the forest. The difference is that the bonsai grows from the limited foundation of the flowerpot, while the tall tree has the rich foundation of the forest bed. The poor are bonsai people. By improving the soil in which they grow, instituting property rights and the rule of law, and including them in networks of productivity and exchange, they too can flourish as people in wealthier nations have. Trickle-up capitalism is a promising strategy. It is already at work around the world. Let's join them and support them. Populist ideological warfare about poorly defined issues and remedies is nothing but a moralistic distraction. The world deserves better from Christian thinkers.

Max Weber Was Wrong (About Capitalism)

Public Discourse: Max Weber Was Wrong - Samuel Greg

... Second, the empirical evidence disproving Weber’s connection between Protestantism and the emergence of capitalism is considerable. Even Catholic critics of modern capitalism have had to concede that “the commercial spirit” preceded the Reformation by at least two hundred years. From the eleventh century onward, the words Deus enim et proficuum (“For God and Profit”) began to appear in the ledgers of Italian and Flemish merchants. This was not a medieval version of some type of prosperity gospel. Rather, it symbolized just how naturally intertwined were the realms of faith and commerce throughout the world of medieval Europe. The pursuit of profit, trade, and commercial success dominated the life of the city-states of medieval and Renaissance Northern Italy and the towns of Flanders, not to mention the Venetian republic that exerted tremendous influence on merchant activity throughout the Mediterranean long before 1517.

Since Weber’s time, much scholarly work has been done to illustrate the advanced state of market-driven economic development in the Middle Ages. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the Belgian scholar Raymond de Roover penned numerous articles illustrating that, during the Middle Ages, financial transactions and banking started to take on the degree of sophistication that is commonplace today. Likewise, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, by the Italian-American historian of medieval European economic history, the late Robert S. Lopez, shattered the historical claims that formed much of the background of Weber’s argument. Lopez demonstrated in great detail the way in which the Middle Ages “created the indispensable material and moral conditions for a thousand years of virtually uninterrupted growth.”

In recent decades, the historians Edwin Hunt and James Murray have illustrated just how much the medieval period was characterized by remarkable innovation in methods of business organization. They also suggest that the advent of modernity actually heralded the expansion of state economic intervention and regulation in an effort to constrain economic freedom. In a similar fashion, the sociologist Rodney Stark has gathered together disparate sources of historical and economic analysis to illustrate the origins of capitalism and major breakthroughs in the theory and practice of wealth creation in the medieval period. Central to Stark’s analysis is his highlighting of the way pre-Reformation Western Christianity saw the world as one in which humans were called upon to use their reason and innate creativity to develop its resources—including economically.

Here one could add that, before Adam Smith, some of the most elaborate thinking about the nature of contracts, free markets, interest, wages, and banking that developed after the Reformation was articulated in the writings of Spanish Catholic scholastic thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Theologians such as Francisco de Vitoria OP, Martín de Azpilcueta, Juan de Mariana SJ, and Tomás de Mercado OP, anticipated many of the claims made by Smith two centuries later.

To be sure, much of this thinking occurred by way of side-effect rather than as a result of the systematic analysis undertaken by Smith. For as commercial relationships expanded throughout Europe in the centuries preceding and following the Reformation, there was a marked increase in the number of penitents asking their confessors for guidance about moral questions with a strong economic dimension. What was the just price? When was a person no longer obliged to adhere to a contract? When was charging interest legitimate? When did it become usurious? As a result, priests looked to theologians for guidance on how to respond to their penitents’ questions. Thus, as Jürg Niehans stressed in his History of Economic Theory:

The scholastics thus found it necessary to descend from theology into the everyday world of economic reality, of early capitalism, foreign trade, monopoly, banking, foreign exchange and public finance. What one knew about these things in the School of Salamanca was hardly less than Adam Smith knew two hundred years later, and more than most students know today.

Even when we consider modern capitalism’s emergence, a direct connection between this event and Protestantism is very open to question. ...

This is a really excellent piece on the history of capitalism.

Why the Church Needs Business

Huffington Post: Why the Church Needs Business

... Beyond the mess that has been the Vatican bank, the Catholic Church can learn a lot from business. This may seem counterintuitive, but the same church that has (rightly) spoken out so forcefully on the excesses and the limitations of capitalism desperately needs some capitalistic skills.

How is it that so many seem to have so little expertise in what so many people take for granted? Not long after the financial crisis in 2008, one priest confidently told me, "Capitalism is dead." I asked him if he could still go to the corner and buy a hotdog. Yes, he said. "That's capitalism," I said. "It's not dead." A few days later another priest with a Ph.D. asked me, as he read about the financial crisis, "What's a bond?"

Whence the lack of business knowledge among otherwise smart and talented (and highly educated) men and women? There are two simple reasons:

First, many cardinals, archbishops, bishops, priests, sisters and brothers now in their 60s and 70s (that is, those running things in the church) often entered their seminaries or religious orders right out of college, even high school. Thus, many (not all, but many) did not have the important experience of having to earn a paycheck, balance a checkbook, manage employees, read a balance sheet, invest in the stock market, and so on.

The second reason is more basic. Once in the seminary or religious order, business education was not a part of their training. This is an immense lacuna in the training or priests and men and women in religious orders. ...

In How the Church Fails Businesspeople (and what can be done about), John Knapp reports that one of the biggest obstacles the church has with influencing businesspeople to think more ethically and theologically about their own lives is the business practices of the church. A congregation's or denomination's sloppiness with finances, the belief that fundamental realities about business and economics can just magically be suspended, and, too often, defensiveness (if not hostility) toward sound business practices causes businesspeople to tune out what the church has to say about material matters. The church holds no credibility. It is good that Pope Francis recognizes the need for gifted businesspeople to aid the church's mission.

Subsidiarity in Five Minutes

Here is a good video on subsidiarity with interesting commentary on why our present political difficulties may be connected to a failure to appreciate it.

Capitalism and the Kingdom - Bob Lupton

I love Bob Lupton's monthly posts in Urban Perspectives newsletter. I identify with what he writes in his latest installment, Capitalism and the Kingdom. Capitalism is not "biblical" in the sense of being prescribed by God. And in that sense, there is no "biblical" economic system. All economic systems are human constructs that incorporate human wisdom and sin. This is not to say that the Bible doesn't give us insight into what constitutes shalom and insight into anthropology. We begin with those insights and work from there to discern the most shalom-filled world we can.

After spending thirty years studying and working on poverty, I am deeply persuaded along with Lupton that business, jobs, and market economies (my word for Lupton's "capitalism") are superior to other options for pursuing shalom in the world ... not biblical, not ordained by God, not perfect ... superior. That doesn't make me right, but it is an honest confession of how I have come to my present conclusions.

The curious thing about this is my inclinations and motivations are likely more similar to people who see themselves as progressive. From childhood, I've been captivated by questions about how to work for a more just and shalom-filled world, particularly as this relates to people at the margins. My graduate degrees, one academic and the other applied were grounded in understanding how society changes and how to change it. I have not come to economics out of a desire for financial success or to buttress deeply held political convictions. I've come to it from a genuine desire for understanding that informs discipleship.

The most challenging thing for me is the realization that most people want to process the issues that concern me through a political lens, first and foremost. I read recently that people are more willing to marry someone of a different religion than they are someone of an opposing political party. I suspect political affiliation may have eclipsed religion as an identity marker in our culture. Consequently, I find many progressives, or people who the Religious Right has burned, will not give me an ear from the start. Their filters tell them I am not one of them, and they need not engage, or they engage with me as the uncompromising ideologue they already know I am. Many on the right overestimate my identification with their political agenda and ambitions. And let me be clear that my mission is not to find some "third way" between extremes. The people that captivate me are those who I sense are rooted in a quest for understanding that runs much deeper than political justification. And I am especially captivated by the people who can ask good questions regardless of how closely our conclusions to date may align. I very much sense Lupton is a kindred spirit, which is why I appreciate him and identify so strongly with this article.

Capitalism and the Kingdom

I have never placed a political campaign sign in my yard. Not that I am disinterested in who gets elected to public office. That's clearly important to me. But to go public with my political biases is likely to alienate about half of the supporters of my non-profit. It's better for business, I have found, to keep my political opinions to myself, to talk out of both sides of my mouth when necessary, and keep my mouth shut when in doubt.

Some might call me spineless. I prefer diplomatic. I can usually see both sides of an issue and when I can find common ground between differing opinions I do my best to steer the conversation toward mutual understanding. When that doesn't work I try to offer some conciliatory comment and then change the subject.

But there is one subject I have always been very straight about: caring for the poor. This is a conviction. There may be disagreement about just how best to do this caring, but for me compassionate and just treatment of the poor is a non-negotiable. It is a Divine mandate. And I will go to the mat over this one.

Because I have been politically elusive, my Democratic friends often pigeonhole me as a Republican with a big heart. My Republican friends peg me as a Democrat who is opposed to entitlements. Both camps seem to think I'm an anomaly. That's probably good for keeping diverse friends and satisfied supporters.

But after forty-plus years of living and serving among the poor, I have witnessed nearly every expression of care that good people have visited upon the less fortunate – from feeding the homeless, to counseling pregnant girls to keep their babies, to patching widows' roofs, to advocating for addicts who need treatment. I have done all of these and hundreds more. And I have been joined by countless others whose hearts compel them to help those in need. Sometimes our service has made a difference (though its really hard to tell, especially in the short run). Sometimes we have inflicted unintentional harm (and that too is hard to tell, since we never quite know what is behind the smiles). One thing I am quite sure of, however: it is much safer being a supportive listener than it is being an eager helper. And another thing I have learned: when you do for others what they have the capacity to do for themselves, you are likely doing them a disservice.

After four decades of serving, the romance is gone. I am left with an unvarnished view of the realities of urban poverty. But the Divine calling imposed upon me to become a neighbor to the poor has never been lifted. And because my commitment and voice and heart remain on the side of the poor, my Democratic friends want to embrace me as a fellow liberal (who has a few right-wing tendencies!). And because I have seen the destructive effects of subsidizing poverty and oppose dependency-producing entitlements, I am accepted by Republican friends as a fellow conservative (but with a heart!). Lately, however, (ever since I came out of the closet with Toxic Charity) I fear this delicate balance I have maintained for so long is beginning to "list to the starboard" (that's tilt to the right). I have begun to publicly declare that the only thing that will enable the poor to emerge from poverty is a decent job. And the primary creators of decent jobs are business people who believe deeply in the free enterprise system. Coming out on the side of capitalism identifies me with Republicans. You see why I'm in trouble now, don't you?

In one of my recent Urban Perspectives I said:
For-profits and not-for-profits represent two fundamental divisions of our economy: wealth creation and wealth transfer. Business is the wealth creator; all others exist on the transfer of that wealth… How strange that business creators, so essential to our well-being, are so often viewed as somehow less spiritual, less compassionate than those who live off the wealth they produce! Strange, too, how we esteem sacrificial non-profit "servants" but malign as greedy capitalists the for-profit producers who underwrite their charities.

One minister friend responded:
Interesting post. I've always loved your even handed approach and refusal to tow the liberal or conservative line. But some of the language in this one surprised me. Capitalism could be baptized but it is not God's final revelation. Some of the language you use here of Ordained For-Profit sector sounds like a myth that profit-driven life will bring the kingdom.

My more liberal friends are suspect of the free enterprise system. They point out to me the excesses, the CEO's who live in opulence and cut their minimum wage employees to thirty hours a week to avoid having to provide health insurance. They say that a system propelled by greed is anything but righteous. They have ready examples of the Enron's that defraud their employees and the BP's that destroy our environment. The for-profit sector is not to be trusted, they contend. Wealth producers, if not carefully controlled and regulated, will more than likely exploit their workers, despoil the environment, cut safety corners, avoid (if not evade) paying taxes, conceal health hazards, and squeeze every penny to the bottom line.

My liberal friends have a point. A competitive economic system can indeed produce winners and losers. And without oversight it can lead to cartels and monopolies. Unchecked greed can certainly be very destructive. All true. But then a socialistic system can produce similar inequities and injustices (minus the wealth creation). Obviously, no economic system is without its shortcomings. But recent history, ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent economic struggles of many European Union member countries, it has become abundantly clear that socialism has failed to deliver on its promises. We are also witnessing the dramatic expansion of economic vitality (and poverty reduction) in China and India as they have cracked open the doors to free enterprise. With all of its potential for exploitation and excess, the capitalistic system is certainly winning the day.

Because capitalism and political freedom are so often linked together, it is tempting to connect them with Judeo-Christian values. That's what my pastor friend was concerned about when he referred to the "myth that profit-driven life will bring the kingdom." Because capitalism has worked so well for us (most of us), making us the most prosperous nation in history, it is tempting to equate it with Shalom. In Judeo-Christian teaching, Shalom, or wholeness, prosperity and peace, is the end to which all righteous people aspire, both here and in the hereafter. Associating capitalism with Shalom may be tempting, yes, but as my minister friend rightly points out: "Capitalism could be baptized but it is not God's final revelation."

I am convinced that the only thing that will enable the poor to emerge from poverty is a decent job. I am further convinced that the best chance of creating decent jobs lies with our free market capitalists. Does this mean that capitalism is the Divine design for bringing about Shalom? I suspect not. Nor is any economic system devised by flawed humanity. But in spite of its bent toward self-interest, even with its excesses and inequities, capitalism has an historic opportunity to create shared prosperity that can benefit every person on the globe. What capitalism needs in order to fulfill its promise is sanctified self-interest.

(Reposted with permission)

The Evangelical Work Ethic

Christianity Today: The Evangelical Work Ethic

Forget Weber. We don't need social science to know that God cares about our work. ...

... American evangelicals have been rediscovering the precious truth that all honest work serves as a spiritual calling to fruitful and worshipful service (Gen. 2:15; Col. 3:22-24). That means everyone – not just religious professionals – has the opportunity to glorify God with their work. We shape ourselves into the kind of people God wants us to be in everything we do, not just in the few hours we spend engaged in church activities. Most of life is work, because God designed us that way. ...

... That doesn't mean all the issues are clear and simple. Nothing shows the difficulty of understanding the relationship between work and faith more than our continued insistence on framing this issue as a debate over Max Weber's long-discredited theory of the Protestant work ethic. Weber argued that Protestants value work because they think prosperity is proof that you're saved; as anyone who knows anything about church history can tell you, this was and is slanderous nonsense. He also argued that teaching people that God values their work created an economic system that thrives on greed and materialism; as anyone who knows economic history can tell you, this is just as preposterous. Weber's theory has been almost universally dismissed by a century of theologians, historians, and economists.

Nonetheless, Weber's terms and categories continue to dominate popular discussions, because his approach strictly separates "facts" from "values." This allows secularists to think about possible cultural connections between faith and work while preserving a comfortable work/spirit dualism in their own lives. That dualism is exactly what the faith and work movement seeks to challenge. As long as Weber dominates the conversation it's difficult to get people to understand the message. 

However, the idea that Protestantism impacts attitudes about work—which the recent research investigates—is not misplaced. The Protestant Reformation brought unique advances in our understanding of God's purposes for work and vocation. ...

... Our culture's hunger for meaning and dignity in everyday work is a window through which Christians can shine the light of the gospel. No civilization can grow and flourish when its people spend the vast majority of their waking hours in an activity they find meaningless. The deepest root of our economic crisis is that people no longer find a worthy purpose in the daily practice of diligence, honesty, self-control, generosity, and service. This creates a timely moment for people to rediscover how God brings dignity and meaning to daily life. ...

The author is right about Weber. I read several of his works in grad school. His significance was in the kinds of questions he asked, not in his particular theories. "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" is no longer accepted as valid social analysis; it wasn't when I was thirty years ago in grad school. It apparently takes some folks a few decades to get the memo. I particularly think the last paragraph quoted above is a keeper.

Church is not Worship, Community, or Mission. It's All Three

Rachel Young has a thoughtful article at the The Presbyterian Outlook's Outpost blog titled, Consumers, missionaries, or worshipers? She writes:

... We use the language of buying and selling, of efficiency, of getting the best product for the best price, even as we think about our relationships, our work, our leisure, our church. We are consumers.

I don't have space in this post to offer evidence for these big claims. Check out Hugh Halter and Matt Smay's book And: The Gathered and Scattered Church for an evaluation of how this metaphor seeps into churches. The consumer metaphor invites us to seek church experiences that fit our interests and time. We go to church to get our spiritual needs met. If I were to modify the answer to the first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism (see below for the actual answer), the consumer might say, "Man's chief end is to connect with God by listening to a great message and hearing great music." ...

So maybe, as some suggest, a better metaphor is missionary. She writes:

... So, we might modify the Westminster Shorter Catechism to say, "Man's chief end is to partner with God to redeem and restore our hurting world."

The missionary metaphor compels me. But, what I find lacking in both of these metaphors is the primacy of worship. Is the gathering of a church only functional? To give people a feel good experience or to shape them as missionaries? Or, are the people of God called first to worship God and then be sent? The first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism actually reads, "Man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever."

I hear her concerns, and I know they are widely shared. I hear similar concerns expressed across the church. But I think pitting these various metaphors against each other, or prioritizing one over the other, IS the problem. I commented in response:

I like how Stan Ott talks about church as three-dimensional: doxological, koinonial, and missional. Or more simply: worship, community, and mission. The three are inseparable. I think classifying desire for a meaningful worship experience as consumerist is overly harsh. It is pursuit of that experience above all else that is destructive. I would also say that pursuit of worship as prior, or over and above the other two, is problematic.

Genuine worship draws us into community and inspires us to mission. Genuine community is worshipful and it is in community that we discern and do mission. Mission is a worshipful response to God and deepens us in community as we do it together. All three aspects must be held together.

There is an ongoing debate in the church about a (false) dichotomy of community (and personal nourishment) versus mission. I sense some want to lift "worship" up as the "third way" out of this conflict. Instead, I suggest that the answer is to embrace all three boldly.

The Gospels of Sin Management

Jesus Creed: The Gospels of Sin Management and Their Empty Allegiance

American evangelicalism is what it is because of its gospel. Dallas Willard calls its gospel the “gospel of sin management.” American liberal Protestantism is what it is because of its gospel. Dallas Willard also calls its gospel the gospel of sin management. (Some of you will know I call this gospel the “soterian” gospel in The King Jesus Gospel.) Its emphases — right and left — is forgiveness of sin, eternal life in heaven, assurance in the here and now, and either an act (decision) or acts (good deeds) are the precipitating element that gains a person access to salvation. ...

... They have an “empty allegiance” to Jesus. You’re in whether are a transformed into Christlikeness or not. ...

... On the Right, the gospel is “vampire faith” (they want Jesus for his blood), it is shaped by atonement theology and obsessed with atonement theology, and it is about “relief from the intrapsychic terrors of fundamentalist versions of hell” (149).

On the Left, the gospel is about “good acts” and activism and “self-determined acts of righteousness” (149). So the Right is about proper beliefs and the Left about proper behaviors. The gospel is about conformity to Christ in a God-bathed kingdom reality. ...

My comment in response:

I think part of the solution is recovery of the significance of everyday life and work. The primary locus of ministry for most of us is our home, our workplace, and our neighborhood. It is with and for those who are in our circle of influence. And when I say "ministry" here, I don't mean using these contexts as staging opportunities for evangelism (though evangelism will occur) or as opportunities right injustices (though righting injustices will occur). I mean seeing our participation in these aspects of life, the living and work that is done there, as integral with serving God.

I think it needs to be noted that the soterian gospel of the right and left places the locus of "ministry" in the pastors and ecclesiastic institutions, elevating the centrality and importance of those connected with these institutions. Conscious or not, there is considerable psychic investment to keep things the way the are because of the affirmation and status it brings. The rest of church becomes amateur helpers to the evangelism/justice professionals, which is okay by many of them because they can go do their good deeds as prescribed by the professionals while living most of the rest of their lives as practical atheists. All in all, an effective codependency.

Saturday Links

 1. Population Reference Bureau has a great resource that maps their 2013 World Population Data Sheet on an interactive map. Here is one example:

2. Modern family redefined: Say 'goodbye' to the typical American family

A New York Times story looking at the skyrocketing rate of birth outside of marriage among women under 30 (now over 50 percent of such births) pointed up one of the key differences between marriages and cohabitating couples:

Almost all of the rise in nonmarital births has occurred among couples living together. While in some countries such relationships endure at rates that resemble marriages, in the United States they are more than twice as likely to dissolve than marriages. In a summary of research, Pamela Smock and Fiona Rose Greenland, both of the University of Michigan, reported that two-thirds of couples living together split up by the time their child turned 10.

The research, in aggregate, says that things are changing for the American family, and quickly. There may be ways for the government to address the trend: increased financial benefits for getting and staying married, for example, or a macro-effort to actively battle rising economic inequality, but systematic change will be a long hard fight. The research seems to suggest that such a fight is worth the effort.

3. The Aging of the Baby Boom and the Growing Care Gap: A Look at Future Declines in the Availability
of Family Caregivers

4. Young People Are Still Dropping Out Of The Labor Force

Kids are likely staying in school for longer (or avoiding work altogether) thanks to a tough labor market. On the other hand, the 65-and-over crowd has seen the sharpest uptick in participation. The financial crisis bled retirement savings, forcing older Americans to stay on the job for longer.

5. How Big Data Is Transforming The Mobile Industry

6. Millennials Now Bringing Their Parents Along On Job Interviews

7. Why Bigger Is No Longer Better

Every manager and entrepreneur wants to grow their business.  Get bigger and more powerful, the thinking goes, and you'll have it made. The added heft will give you the upper hand in negotiations with suppliers and the doors of customers will swing wide open.

That used to be true to a certain extent, but not so much anymore. Digital technology has markedly evened out the playing field. Startups become billion dollar companies overnight while venerable brands like Kodak and Blockbuster hit the skids.

This turn of events presents considerable challenges for managers.  While there are still some advantages to scale, the disadvantages often outweigh them.  You have lots of customers, a large workforce and stodgy institutional investors to keep happy, all of which contribute to strategic rigidity.  To compete in the new economy, we need a new playbook. ...

8. Can For-Profit Corporations Have Religious Purposes?

...Okay, some may respond (e.g., here), churches and other organizations have free exercise rights, but for-profit corporations do not.  But why would this be?  An individual sole proprietor — of, say, a kosher deli, to use Will's example — would clearly be able to press a religious liberty claim, whether or not she hopes the deli will make her rich (and whether or not she commits to donate her earnings to a religious charity).   Does this individual lose such rights if she incorporated?   Does that somehow make her religious motivations any less sincere? Any less judicially cognizable?  I can't see how.   What, then, if the deli owner formed a partnership with her equally devout brother?  Would that matter?  And, again, if an informal partnership would be okay, why would the adoption of a corporate form and limited liability matter?

The consequence of the "no religious liberty for corporations" position is that individuals who would like to go into business are penalized if they seek to go into business without any potential recourse, under RFRA or otherwise.  The choice presented by the state is go into business or stay true to your religious beliefs.  Although I suggested otherwise before, it seems to me this approach imposes a substantial burden on the exercise of religion.  Whether this burden can be justified in a given case is a separate question, but the burden is there. ...

9. Five Insights About Private Property from Aquinas

1. God designed creation to support life, especially human life. ...
2. Private property engenders good stewardship. ...
3. Private ownership supports order in society. ...
4. Private property helps maintain peace in communities. ...
5. Private property benefits the community. ...

10. Germans Revolt Against Germany's Green Energy Revolution

11. Brussels fears European 'industrial massacre' sparked by energy costs

Europe's industry is being ravaged by exorbitant energy costs and an over-valued euro, blighting efforts to reverse years of global manufacturing decline.

12. What If Roads Lasted Twice As Long?

If there were a better way to take care of roads in the Lone Star State, it would be a very valuable idea.

Enter Sahadat Hossain, an associate professor of civil engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington and the man behind a new state program to shore up crumbling roads using an underground support system of recycled plastic pins.

"Just think about it," Hossain says. "You need one million dollars to repair something. Or you can use a sustainable recycling material and do it for $200- or $300,000. You don't need to be an engineer to see that."

The scheme's low price is matched by its high effectiveness. In a two-year feasibility study that concluded this August, sections of Texas Route 287 with 10-foot-long pins drilled into the roadway slope moved only one to two inches. The control sections, left unsupported, moved 15 to 16 inches. ...

... The input cost of the pins, which have previously been tested in Missouri, is less than 50 percent that of traditional highway support measures like retaining walls. And because they are made from recycled plastic—each pin contains about 500 soda bottles—the pin concept turns plastic's non-decomposition from an environmental headache to an engineering solution. ...

13. This Map Shows Which Countries Are Going To Make The World Cup, According To Nate Silver's Prediction Model

 

Learn About Tableau

14. Why So Many Articles Have Terrible Headlines Online

15. The 11 Most Common Grammatical Mistakes And How To Avoid Them

16. What would happen if your church was reviewed on TripAdvisor?

Churches spend a lot of time on the big things, like a glorious anthem and prophetic preaching. But a UMC pastor says small details matter, too, like lights that burn brightly, signs that make sense and greeters who greet. ...

Saturday Links

1. Phillip Swagel with a good piece on Inequality and Opportunity

... I am not convinced, however, that the president's proposals are well matched to the problem he describes. Indeed, Mr. Obama is better at describing the outcomes he seeks than at putting forward a coherent set of policies to reach those outcomes. But I think I see what he has in mind.

Mr. Obama is looking at two horizons. The main determinant of inequality is what the Harvard economics professors Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz call a "race between technological change and educational attainment." Technology has increased the demand for skilled workers but educational attainment has not kept up, leading to rising payoffs for those at the top. Widening inequality reflects the fact that too many Americans do not have the skills needed for today's economy. But changing this takes time. So while he proposes universal preschool to benefit the future work force and new training programs delivered through community colleges for existing workers, Mr. Obama seeks to foster a stronger economy here and now, to drive higher earnings for people at all income levels rather than just those at the top. ...

2. Shared Justice: Beyond Purely Economic Solutions to Poverty

Christians must agree on a holistic definition of poverty that includes relational and spiritual elements. ...

... But is the problem of poverty really that simple, a lack of opportunity given to those in the lowest economic class? It depends on how you define the terms "poverty" and "opportunity," as well as the terms "justice" and "charity"—all of which require multi-dimensional definitions if we hope to build a constructive conversation around the problem of poverty. Throughout the next two months at Shared Justice, we'll be fostering that conversation; to do so, though, we first must return to the basics and refine the questions. In other words, the question is: What are the right definitions?

But is the problem of poverty really that simple, a lack of opportunity given to those in the lowest economic class? It depends on how you define the terms "poverty" and "opportunity," as well as the terms "justice" and "charity"—all of which require multi-dimensional definitions if we hope to build a constructive conversation around the problem of poverty. Throughout the next two months at Shared Justice, we'll be fostering that conversation; to do so, though, we first must return to the basics and refine the questions. In other words, the question is: What are the right definitions? ...

... Broken relationships lie at the root of all of these things, so solving poverty demands that we meet more than just material needs—and that isn't easy. Generally Christians today have engaged in one-way giving and service amounting to little more than charity in the end, which is only part of our calling. And the result? Christians and the church have been relatively ineffective at providing lasting opportunities for the poor to overcome their situations. ...

3. Charitable Giving: Baby Boomers Donate More, Study Shows

4. Economist: Rewriting history - "A new measure for GDP adds billions to America's economy"

5. Why the Church and Charity Aren't Enough - Derek Penwell

...My friend argues that taking care of the poor is the church's responsibility -- that people who work hard shouldn't have to give so much of what they earn back to the government in taxes. Government is notoriously inefficient and sloppy.

So, I tell him that all of that might be true, but to people on the outside looking in, to folks who don't share his strong faith in the church's ability to get it right either, such a theology of social organization looks suspiciously like a dodge -- a flimsy attempt to baptize selfishness. To them it sounds like "I got mine … through a paradoxical admixture of my hard work and God's blessing, which means God wants me to have all this stuff; and conversely, it means God doesn't want poor people to have any stuff, let alone my stuff."...

6. Why China's 'Dominance' of Manufacturing Is Misleading

Gaudy statistics aside, the country has struggled to do what it needs to do -- move up the value chain.

On Monday, The Atlantic wrote a story based on an International Business Times infographic that portrayed China's enduring prominence in manufacturing. Remember, though; prominence is not the same as success. (Just consider this sentence: "Alex Rodriguez continues to be a very prominent baseball player.") China will play a major role in global manufacturing for years -- and probably decades -- to come. But the country's role is not a healthy one, and the weaknesses in Chinese manufacturing outshine the huge numbers displayed in the graph. ...

 

7. The Average American Car Is Older Than Ever Before

 

"The average age of the 247 million light vehicles on American roads today is 11.4 years, an all-time high, according to a new study from Polk. ..."

 

8. Redistributing Wealth Is the Wrong Way to Fix a Rigged Game

 

Elites shouldn't be forced to share ill-gotten gains -- they should be prevented from ever getting them.

 

9. How should the US deliver food aid?

 

Food shipped from America has saved the lives of millions of people since the Food for Peace programme was set up in 1954, but the strict rules demanding almost all of the food has to be sourced in the US and sent on American ships are coming under increasing attack.

10. Many Americans have no friends of another race: poll

About 40 percent of white Americans and about 25 percent of non-white Americans are surrounded exclusively by friends of their own race, according to an ongoing Reuters/Ipsos poll.

 

The Gospel According to ‘Me’

New York Times: The Gospel According to ‘Me’

The booming self-help industry, not to mention the cash cow of New Age spirituality, has one message: be authentic! Charming as American optimism may be, its 21st-century incarnation as the search for authenticity deserves pause. The power of this new version of the American dream can be felt through the stridency of its imperatives: Live fully! Realize yourself! Be connected! Achieve well-being!

Despite the frequent claim that we are living in a secular age defined by the death of God, many citizens in rich Western democracies have merely switched one notion of God for another — abandoning their singular, omnipotent (Christian or Judaic or whatever) deity reigning over all humankind and replacing it with a weak but all-pervasive idea of spirituality tied to a personal ethic of authenticity and a liturgy of inwardness. The latter does not make the exorbitant moral demands of traditional religions, which impose bad conscience, guilt, sin, sexual inhibition and the rest.

Unlike the conversions that transfigure the born-again’s experience of the world in a lightning strike, this one occurred in stages: a postwar existentialist philosophy of personal liberation and “becoming who you are” fed into a 1960s counterculture that mutated into the most selfish conformism, disguising acquisitiveness under a patina of personal growth, mindfulness and compassion. Traditional forms of morality that required extensive social cooperation in relation to a hard reality defined by scarcity have largely collapsed and been replaced with this New Age therapeutic culture of well-being that does not require obedience or even faith — and certainly not feelings of guilt. Guilt must be shed; alienation, both of body and mind, must be eliminated, most notably through yoga practice after a long day of mind-numbing work.

In the gospel of authenticity, well-being has become the primary goal of human life. Rather than being the by-product of some collective project, some upbuilding of the New Jerusalem, well-being is an end in itself. The stroke of genius in the ideology of authenticity is that it doesn’t really require a belief in anything, and certainly not a belief in anything that might transcend the serene and contented living of one’s authentic life and baseline well-being. In this, one can claim to be beyond dogma. ...

Saturday Links

1. Climate change: A cooling consensus

... Mr Cohn does his best to affirm that the urgent necessity of acting to retard warming has not abated, as does Brad Plumer of the Washington Post, as does this newspaper. But there's no way around the fact that this reprieve for the planet is bad news for proponents of policies, such as carbon taxes and emissions treaties, meant to slow warming by moderating the release of greenhouse gases. The reality is that the already meagre prospects of these policies, in America at least, will be devastated if temperatures do fall outside the lower bound of the projections that environmentalists have used to create a panicked sense of emergency. Whether or not dramatic climate-policy interventions remain advisable, they will become harder, if not impossible, to sell to the public, which will feel, not unreasonably, that the scientific and media establishment has cried wolf.

Dramatic warming may exact a terrible price in terms of human welfare, especially in poorer countries. But cutting emissions enough to put a real dent in warming may also put a real dent in economic growth. This could also exact a terrible humanitarian price, especially in poorer countries. Given the so-far unfathomed complexity of global climate and the tenuousness of our grasp on the full set of relevant physical mechanisms, I have favoured waiting a decade or two in order to test and improve the empirical reliability of our climate models, while also allowing the economies of the less-developed parts of the world to grow unhindered, improving their position to adapt to whatever heavy weather may come their way. I have been told repeatedly that "we cannot afford to wait". More distressingly, my brand of sceptical empiricism has been often met with a bludgeoning dogmatism about the authority of scientific consensus. ...

2. The 40 Biggest Economies In The World

3. How the world's population has changed

4. Americans are giving less money to God

Americans donated $316 billion to charitable causes in 2012, a 3.5% increase from 2011, a new report by the Giving USA Foundation found. But while charitable donations to education increased 7% to $41 billion, religious donations dropped slightly (by 0.2%) to $101.54 billion. "Americans continue to be the most generous people in the world, despite discretionary income percentages nearing all-time lows," says Eileen Heisman, CEO of the National Philanthropic Trust. But donors are writing the checks to different recipients.

5. I'm not endorsing this analysis, but here is The Capitalist's Case for a $15 Minimum Wage.

6. Gil Press says The 'End Of Innovation' Crowd Doesn't Get IT

In one camp are economists such as Robert Gordon and Tyler Cowen that tell us that we have reached "a technological plateau." We are experiencing today the waning of the economic impact of the technological revolutions of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The IT revolution, they argue, is different from earlier technological revolutions in its more limited impact on productivity growth and standards of living.

In the other camp are economists such as Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, who recently told the graduating class at Bard College:"…innovation, almost by definition, involves ideas that no one has yet had, which means that forecasts of future technological change can be, and often are, wildly wrong. A safe prediction, I think, is that human innovation and creativity will continue; it is part of our very nature. Another prediction, just as safe, is that people will nevertheless continue to forecast the end of innovation."

7. How Technology Is Changing The Future Of Capitalism From Competing To Sharing

Can't get a loan from a bank to start your business? You can create a Kickstarter and raise all the money you need from the people who'd be interested in your product in the first place.

It's amazing to see the ways people are coming up with to better take advantage of the web to collaborate on and share the things that we used to have to pay for ourselves.

8. U.S. for first time in 50+ years a net gasoline exporter

9. U.S. Sustains Support For Small Modular Nuclear Reactors

Despite the political fallout from the Fukushima crisis, the U.S. Department of Energy remains committed to commercializing small modular nuclear reactor (SMR) technologies.

10. Houses that flip and fold into place

Turns out, prefab may be the most environmentally friendly way to build a house. When a house is built in a factory there's less waste -- materials can be precision measured and cut -- plus a prefab structure can be erected within a couple of weeks -- avoiding months and months of workmen driving greenhouse gas spewing trucks to the site. One speaker at Fortune's Brainstorm Green conference earlier this year, Bill Haney -- founder and CEO of Blu Homes, cited another advantage of prefab housing: "No one can build a traditional house on time or on budget. Psychology Today cited a study that said it's more painful to build a house than it is to have a loved one die."

Haney has added a high-tech element to his prefab green houses. Applying technology developed at MIT, Blu Homes designs its modern structures using steel frames that fold on hinges much like a card table. Today, most prefab homes must be delivered at great expense on wide-load trucks that are too big to travel on many roads and have to be accompanied by escort cars. A Blue Home, by contrast, can be folded up to fit on an 18-wheeler, allowing the house to be shipped relatively cheaply and easily from the company's factory in Vallejo, Calif.

11. 71% Of Millennials Want Their Co-Workers To Be A 'Second Family'

12. Demographic Changes Impact Religious Institutions

13. A fascinating piece on Why Men Die Younger Than Women: The 'Guys Are Fragile' Thesis

14. Scientists discover why leprosy disappeared from Europe

The material they found was "a mixture of human DNA, microorganisms and contaminating DNA from other bones and surrounding soil," said Cole, but they were able to fully reconstruct a 600-year-old strain of leprosy and map its genome, only to find that it is essentially identical to living leprosy infecting people in the developing world today.

Cole told NPR, "If the explanation of the drop in leprosy cases isn't in the pathogen, then it must be in the host, that is, in us."

The scientists believe that a certain gene that makes people highly resistant to leprosy spread through the population of Europe, gradually conveying a kind of mass immunity.

15. World's last telegram to be sent next month

16. Top 10 People with Only One Known Photograph

17. Psychologist Analyzes Superheroes

18. Joel Willitts on "Storied Typology" – A possibly more biblical way of thinking about the relationship between the OT & NT

Admittedly, I'm just beginning to work this out, but if we think of Bible as Story and we read the earlier bits as indispensible building blocks in the narrative development toward its resolution than there's no need to denigrate the earlier in view of the later bits of the story. Each part has its place in the story bringing it to its final act, although even this analogy must be carefully delimited. Because "final" in this sense does not mean "The End, but a new stage of the story. So because of the earlier blocks of the story, later scenes and characters become "narratological necessities" (to quote my good friend Daniel Kirk). Furthermore, if there is something of an "incompleteness" to the earlier parts of the story, it is incomplete only as earlier scenes are incomplete without subsequent ones. It is correct then to see the Bible's story as progressive. In Stephen Wellum's words, "it is a word-act revelation that is progressively given" (Kingdom Through Covenant, 90). Instead of using the label "progressive revelation" it may be more useful in stressing the storied nature of the development to call it "storied revelation"- Scripture is a story that unfolds. All of this, of course assumes that God has generated His Story and that story is contained in the Old and New Testaments of the Christian canon.

Saturday Links

1. Loved this one: 22 Maps That Show How Americans Speak English Totally Differently From Each Other. Here is one example.

2. In print and on stage, the Bible makes surprise comeback in secular Norway

3. Japan enters the African aid game: Japan $1 billion aid earmarked for northern Africa

4. The Economist had a great editorial: Towards the end of poverty

Nearly 1 billion people have been taken out of extreme poverty in 20 years. The world should aim to do the same again.

5. Global Wealth Grew 7.8% In 2012, Driven By Developing Economies

BCG found that global private financial wealth grew at the impressive clip of 7.8% in 2012, besting the 7.3% and 3.6% expansion logged in 2010 and 2011, respectively.

And which countries are driving global growth? Tyler Cowen reports that China and India for half of the growth. He also lists these nations as the fastest growing:

South Sudan	32.1
Libya	20.2
Sierra Leone	17.1
Mongolia	14.0
Paraguay	11.0
Timor-Leste	10.0
Iraq	9.0
Panama	9.0
The Gambia	8.9
Mozambique	8.4

source: IMF

6. 5 Maps That Show How Divided America Really Is. Here is an example:

7. Toward a Self Employed Nation?

The United States labor market has been undergoing a substantial shift toward small-scale entrepreneurship. The number of proprietors – owners of businesses who are not wage and salary employees, has skyrocketed, especially in the last decade. Proprietors are self employed business owners who use Internal Revenue Service Schedule C to file their federal income tax. Wage and salary workers are all employees of any establishment (private or government), from executives to non-supervisory workers.

From 2000 to 2011, the number of non-farm proprietors grew by 10.7 million. Total wage and salary employment grew by only 105,000 between 2000 and 2011. Government employment, including federal, state and local, grew 1.36 million, while private employment declined by 1.26 million (Figure 1).

8. This looks like an interesting read: Living Faith: Everyday Religion and Mothers in Poverty. Christian Century writes:

For her award-winning book Living Faith: Everyday Religion and Mothers in Poverty, Susan Crawford Sullivan interviewed a diverse group of women who were living in poverty. She asked them about the challenges of parenting, working and surviving on little income. She discovered that many drew on strong religious beliefs as they struggled with everyday problems. Sullivan teaches sociology at the College of the Holy Cross.

 9. Business Insider reports that Millions Of Seniors Are Moving Back To Big Cities

10. Forbes explores How To Use Pinterest For Small Business

11. Atlantic explores Why the Boomers Are the Most Hated Generation. (I think part of it might be that we are obnoxious.)

12. RJS at Jesus Creed with another great post about the historicity of Adam and Eve: Jesus on Adam and Eve (RJS)

... There are ways to reconcile a literal Adam and Eve with the scientific data. I have posted on the question of Adam many times. See for example the last part of Evolution, Entropy, and Human Beings 2 or other posts on the question of Adam listed about 3/4 of the way down the Science and Faith index. Reconciling a literal Adam and Eve with the scientific data requires something of a stretch, but is not impossible if one feels that the theological teaching of the sweep of scripture requires Adam, Eve, and the Fall.

There are also ways to understand the sweep of scripture and the fallen nature of mankind without reference to a historical Adam and Eve. These do not necessarily diminish the inspiration and authority of scripture as witness to the work of God in the world.

This shouldn’t be a make or break issue. Rather, it is an issue where we need to spend more time and thought.

Business as Calling

Last summer, I had the privilege of meeting Dr. Thom Thomson, professor of finance at the University of Texas. Dr. Thomson was in Toronto a week ago preaching at his brother's church, Every Nation, Greater Toronto. The topic was "Business as Calling." This is a wonderful presentation! You can find the 30 sermon at Faith & the Marketplace Part 2: BUSINESS AS CALLING or by clicking below. For some reason, my player indicates it will be 78 minutes long, but it is actually about 30 minutes. (Disclosure: At 11:40 into the sermon, the author of the controversial Facebook post was me. I was intrigued that Dr. Thomson picked up on this post because I have privately used the responses to the post as an example of the deep cynicism toward business held by so many theological professionals.):

Here is the sermon setup:

A leading personal finance magazine published its list of the 10 best fields of study based on the potential they had of offering a steady, well-paying career. Some of you may already be pursuing these studies or are in these business areas, such as Pharmacy and Pharmacology, Nursing, Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Management Information Systems and Treatment Therapy Professions. As we read the New Testament in the Bible, we come across other popular professions: Jesus was a carpenter. Paul was a tentmaker. And Peter was a fisherman. All noble business pursuits providing a valuable service to the community and offering a means to make a good living. Our city – Toronto – is built on business. So how does faith enter the equation? Does it have a place? This week Dr. Thomas Thomson, a finance professor at the University of Texas, continues our series by giving us a fresh perspective on how faith can positively affect business and how business can be a worthy calling. Join us, and bring a friend, to Innis Town Hall at 10:30 a.m.

The Active Life - 8. “Threatened With Resurrection": Acts of Death or New Life. Parker Palmer

Today we come to the eighth and final chapter in Parker Palmer's The Active Life: A Spirituality of Creativity, Work, and Caring, titled "' Threatened With Resurrection': Acts of Death or New Life."

The Horizons of Action

In this final chapter, Palmer offers insight into the meaning of resurrection. He opens by reminding us that we live our lives in view of a coming horizon. How we view that horizon shapes our action. If all we see is death on the horizon, we can become fearful and despondent.

But when we envision a horizon that holds the hope of life, we are free to act without fear, free to act in truth and love and justice today because those very qualities seem to shape our own destiny. (139)

The hope of resurrection can set us free. Yet Palmer offers an interesting insight into resurrection.

I have sometimes feared life itself, and the movement toward new life, more than I have feared death in its various forms. (140)

We are prone to become accustomed to our pain and dysfunctions, and losing them … dying to them … threatens our very identity and ability to make sense of the world.

Death in various forms is sometimes comforting, while resurrection and new life can be demanding and threatening. If I lived as if resurrection were real, and allowed myself to die for the sake of new life, what might I be called upon to do? (142)

Who Threatens Us?

In the second section of this chapter, Palmer turns to a poem by Julia Esquivel titled They Have Threatened Us With Resurrection. (You can follow the link to read the poem.) The context for the poem is the murder and repression of peasants in Guatemala from the 1950s to 1980s. Her poem suggests that both the oppressors and the martyred oppressed threaten us with resurrection.

"… On the one hand, we fear the killers, but not simply because they want to kill us. We fear them because they test our convictions about resurrection, they test our willingness to be brought into a larger life than the one we know. On the other hand, we fear the innocent victims of the killers, those who have died for love and justice and peace. Though they are our friends, we fear them because they call us to follow them in "this marathon of Hope." If we were to take their calling seriously, we ourselves would have to undergo some form of dying."

And …

So we huddle together in our conspiracy of silence, trying to ignore both the death and their murderers, trying to ignore the ambiguous call of the new life that lies beyond death. (148)

As Palmer notes, the "Us" in the poem's title isn't just about the killers and the killed. We, the ones observing this, are part of the "Us" as well.

The Meaning of Resurrection

Toward the end of this section. Palmer writes:

For Esquivel, there is no resurrection of isolated individuals. She is simply not concerned about private resurrections, yours or mine or her own. Each of us is resurrected only as we enter into the network of relationships called community, a network that embraces not only living persons but people who have died, and nonhuman creatures as well. Resurrection has personal significance – if we understand the person as a communal being – but it is above all a corporate, social and political event, an event in which justice and truth and love come to fruition. (152)

I think Palmer writes some important stuff here. Resurrection isn't simply being raised into a new life and a personal relationship with Jesus. Resurrection is the consummation of the Kingdom of God. It is the realization of the world that God intended from the beginning. Resurrection is threatening to our complacent existence, but it is also the hope that animates us.

Resurrection Into Community

Death is our constant companion. We can live in denial of it, or we can embrace it as our companion.

… if we try to gain life by denying death, the paradoxical result is that we become lifeless. This is why "disillusionment" is so important, for by losing our illusions we can tap the energy of the reality that lies beyond them. Once we are thoroughly disillusioned we can say, with Thoreau, "Reality is fabulous!" No matter how difficult reality may be, it contains more life than any illusion.

And …

The reality is that sooner or later all we have will be taken from us by death. But if we can live with the threat of resurrection in our bones, then we will live truly and well. Then we will join in a corporate witness that is immortal, a witness that is only strengthened by the forces of death, a witness that is in itself the resurrection life. (155)

Palmer goes on to say:

For many of us, the life we need to lose is the life lived in the image of the autonomous self, and the life we shall then find is that of the self embedded in community – a community that connects us not only to other people but the natural world as well. No wonder resurrection is threatening … (156)

He wraps up the chapter with this:

In the active life of work, creativity, and caring we are given endless opportunities to lose ourselves so that we may find ourselves, to join with others in the great community so that free from the fear of isolation, we may become who we are. It is the testimony of Julia Esquivel that by joyfully embracing the threat of resurrection we can work, create, and care in ways that take us not toward the futility of death but toward the fullness of new life for ourselves and for the whole of creation. (157)

As I reflected on this chapter and the whole book, it drove home a very important point to me: it is too frequently overlooked. Living the resurrection life is frequently cast in terms of getting on board with some "big deal"… going to an unreached community with the message of Jesus or losing ourselves in some great struggle for justice or compassion. I do not doubt that the resurrection life leads some of us for a period into such "big deals." But as I've read Scot McKnight write about other topics, "This is true but not true enough." I read Palmer to say that resurrection life penetrates all our work, creativity, and caring, which means all of our work, creativity, and caring is mission. The "big deal" is not an escape from secular and trivial life into a sacred and meaningful life. When it emerges, the "big deal" springs from having ALL of life deeply embedded in resurrection life. Our most menial daily acts are opportunities for service in the Kingdom of God. The big deal turns out to be the daily small deal.

 

Questions:

How have you been threatened by resurrection?

How do react to the idea of "resurrection into community," rather than simply an event tied to your personal narrative?

Do you experience your daily life as deeply connected to the resurrection? Why or why not?

Previous [Index]

The Active Life - 7. “Loaves and Fishes": Acts of Scarcity or Abundance. Parker Palmer

Today we come to the seventh chapter in Parker Palmers’ The Active Life: A Spirituality of Work, Creativity, and Caring, titled “’Loaves and Fishes’: Acts of Scarcity or Abundance.” We will begin with a review of Palmer’s main points. I agree with his general conclusion in this chapter, but I find his path to his conclusions problematic (more below.) The story in this chapter is the story of the Loaves and Fishes from the Gospel of Mark:

The Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes

The apostle returned to Jesus, and told him all that they had done and taught. And he said to them, “Come away by yourselves to a lonely place, and rest a while.” For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. And they went away in the boat to a lonely place by themselves. Now many saw them going, and knew them, and they ran there on foot from all the towns, and got there ahead of them. As he landed he saw a great throng, and he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things. And when it grew late, his disciples came to him and said, “This is a lonely place, and the hour is now late; send them away, to go into the country and villages round about and buy themselves something to eat.” But he answered them, “You give them something to eat.” And they said to him, “Shall we go and buy two hundred denarii worth of bread, and give it to them to eat?” And he said to them. “How many loaves have you? Go and see.” And when they had found out, they said, “Five, and two fish.” Then he commanded them all to sit down by companies upon the green grass. So they sat down in groups, by hundreds and by fifties. And taking the five loaves and the two fish he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples to set before the people; and divided the two fish among them all. And they all ate and were satisfied. And they took up twelve baskets full of the broken pieces and of the fish. And those who ate the loaves were five thousand people. (Mark 6:30-44, RSV. Inclusive language by Palmer.)

Palmer sees action and contemplation as inseparable in this story. Jesus and the disciples intend to take a break, but the crowds follow them. This pressed home ever clearer the gifts they had to give and their own need to give them. But unlike the Angel in Buber’s story, these actions are not from “above.” The passage says Jesus acted out of compassion. It was responsive, not reflexive. It sprang from a sense of inner truth, much like the experience of the woodcarver.

But the focus of the story is this:

Hunger and food, of both the literal and metaphorical sorts, are the dominant images of this story. I want to translate these images into generic terms of scarcity and abundance. … In this story, as throughout his active life, Jesus wanted to help people penetrate the illusion of scarcity and act out the reality of abundance. (124)

The Scarcity Assumption

The quality of our active lives depends heavily on whether we assume a world of scarcity or a world of abundance. Do we inhabit a universe where the basic things that people need – from food and shelter to a sense of competence and of being loved – are ample in nature? Or is this a universe where such goods are in short supply, available only to those who have the power to beat everyone else to the store? The nature of our action will be heavily conditioned by the way we answer those bedrock questions. In a universe of scarcity, only people who know the arts of competing, even of making war will be able to survive. But in a universe of abundance, acts of generosity and community become not only possible but fruitful as well. (124-125)

From here, Palmer enters a critique of contemporary economic systems. He views competition as a result of false consciousness about scarcity. He says:

When we Americans, who comprise some six percent of the world’s population, consume over a third of the world’s resources, we create real scarcity for others.  (125)

By extrapolation, I understand him to believe that there is a fixed amount of resources in the world. Those resources would be more than sufficient for all if redistributed. A direct consequence of some having too much is that others do not have enough. Furthermore, he complains:

The cash-exchange mechanism makes it so much easier for us to ignore the gross inequities in the distribution of food and shelter around the world. (126)

In contrast …

When we are in community, many things we think we must buy in the marketplace suddenly become available free of charge. (127)

… and …

Community and abundance go hand in hand; the two words are nearly synonymous. (128)

… and …

… the first step in any action that assumes abundance and wants to amplify it is to perceive, and receive, those resources already present to us in the abundance of life itself. (129)

In my estimation, Palmer is a profound philosopher/theologian but not a very good economist. More on that at the end.

The True Miracle

Many people focus on a “magical” quality in this story. But they may be missing the intended personal application. Like the woodcarver in the earlier story, we might say, “the Spirits did it,” seeing ourselves as bystanders. Palmer writes:

What Jesus does instead of magic is to act on the assumption of abundance. First, he divides the crowd into “companies” of hundreds and fifties and commands them all “to sit down … upon the green grass.” His miracle begins with the simple act of gathering the faceless crowd of five thousand into smaller, face-to-face communities. This is the stock-in-trade of every good community organizer, this clustering of people into more intimate settings where everyday miracles have a chance to happen. (130)

… and …

In the faceless crowd we experience scarcity – a scarcity of contact, of concern, of affirmation, of love. But as the crowd is replaced by community, an invisible sense of abundance arises long before the community produces any visible goods or services. True abundance resides in the simple experience of people being present to one another and for one another.  (130)

Palmer says he feels no need to dismiss a supernatural interpretation of the story, but he suspects a different miracle was happening. As the small groups of people saw the disciples being generous, they were inspired to share what they had with each other.  He writes ...

… the experience of community it is itself abundance. In the faceless crowd we experience scarcity – a scarcity of contact, of concern, of affirmation, of love. But as the crowd is replaced by community, an invisible sense of abundance arises long before the community produces any visible goods and services.

… and conversely …

Our refusal to believe that we have enough is one cause of the competition that has resulted in such an inequitable distribution of resources at home and around the world. (132)

Leadership for Community

Palmer closes the chapter by noting how action and contemplation are intertwined in this story. The presenting issue is the need to feed so many people. That leads to contemplation of the problem. That contemplation informs Jesus that there is enough. There is abundance. But the realization is pointless without action. So by active participation in the truth of God’s abundance and sending his followers to act on such a basis, a miracle happens. That miracle transforms individuals and communities, leading them into deeper contemplation of God and the truth of the world God created. Abundance requires our participation, but it is not our creation. So also, with community.

“But even as we act to evoke community, we must remember that community itself is a gift to be received, not a goal to be achieved. We have a strong tendency to make community one more project among many, to struggle and strain to come into relationship with one another, only to find that the stress of the very efforts exhausts us and drives us apart. Still, time after time we try to “make” community happen in the same effortful and self-defeating ways. Why? Because as long as we are the makers, we remain in control; and as long as we are in control, we will not be vulnerable to the risks of true community.” (136)

A Rejoinder

Palmer has some very important truths in this chapter, but his misunderstanding of economics shades things in some unfortunate ways.

First, scarcity is real! God may have created a world of abundant natural resources, but none are useful to humanity without human action (apart from air and sunshine). Matter, energy, and data must be transformed from less useful to more useful forms through human imagination and labor. Everything we need cannot be fabricated at once. Each human being has a finite level of labor, combined with a finite number of hours to work on any given day. Priorities must be set. Production capacity is scarce relative to what we need at any given moment. How will we decide which things to do in which order? How can abundance best be realized given the absolute scarcity of goods and services? Economics studies how we go about these decisions. We can acknowledge the abundance of resources God has entrusted to us. But economics acknowledges the scarcity of goods and services with the appreciation that generation of abundance is humanity’s aim.

Second, Palmer says, “When we Americans, who comprise some six percent of the world’s population, consume over a third of the world’s resources, we create real scarcity for others.” (125) This statement is incorrect in two technical ways.

• The USA may have consumed one-third of the resources the world consumed in a year, but it did not consume one-third of the world’s resources. Each year, only a small fraction of global resources is consumed.
• At the time Palmer was writing twenty years ago, the USA percentage of the global economy was about 23%, and the USA share of the world population was about 4.5%. Since 1999, the USA share of the global economy has been shrinking by a fraction each year, down to about 19% today. The share of the world population is only slightly smaller.

But his statement and analysis are indicative of a deeper conceptual flaw: Palmer sees the world economy as a zero-sum game. The world has a fixed number of goods and services (not just resources). That number is constant from year to year. If someone has more than the average, others must have correspondingly less. With generosity, we would equal out the imbalance in the zero-sum game.

The world economy is not a zero-sum game. Since Palmer wrote his book, the world economy has grown by about 50%. The USA share of the world economy has declined to 19% over the last two decades. The share has also dropped for Europe (27% to 21%) and Japan (9% to 6%). Yet all of these economies have grown over the same period. How is it possible for their shares of the world economy to decline as their economies become larger? Because regions outside these nations are growing even faster (like China, 2.5% to 12.5%, and India, 2.5% to 5%), the size of the global economy is growing. Again, the world economy is not a zero-sum game.

Mohammad Yunnis, “Banker to the Poor” wrote Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism.

“To me, the poor are like Bonsai trees. When you plant the best seed of the tallest tree in a six-inch deep flower pot, you get a perfect replica of the tallest tree, but it is only inches tall. There is nothing wrong with the seed you planted; only the soil-base you provided was inadequate.

Poor people are bonsai people. There is nothing wrong with their seeds. Only society never gave them a base to grow on.”

Just as there are bonsai people, there are also bonsai economies in nations across the globe. They can flourish just as much given the right soil as the other trees.

(I know some will interject here that such growth will exhaust our resources. It will not … or at least it need not. Such thinking discounts human creativity and imagination. That discussion is for another day.)

Third, Palmer fails to distinguish between face-to-face community and commercial society. He correctly identifies the need for face-to-face interaction with others if community is to emerge. I affirm all he has to say about community. Within such community, we come to know each other truly. We can share and care based on personal knowledge of need and merit. Attempts to substitute market exchange to fulfill many of the things we find in community are rightly challenged. But each of us can only be in true community with a few dozen people, at most. How do we coordinate economic activity beyond the scope of face-to-face community?

Most things we use today, from #2 pencils to high-tech gear, require the seamless coordination of countless thousands (millions?) of people scattered across the planet. We cannot accomplish them in face-to-face community. Prices in a market system help people know the demand for their work and the goods they produce. Prices are an information system that coordinates our behavior. Without prices and monetary exchange, people cannot know how much to buy or sell. Without this information, there is no way to achieve substantial prosperity. People are left only to the resources immediately available to them in local community. There is much less to be generous with.

Palmer writes:

“The cash-exchange mechanism makes it so much easier for us to ignore the gross inequities in the distribution of food and shelter around the world.” (132)

No! As I said above, employing the cash-exchange mechanism in face-to-face community is often inappropriate, but the cash-exchange mechanism is absolutely essential for commercial society and for reducing inequities around the world. Certainly, generosity in the form of aid to relieve immediate need is required, but the bigger issue is that bonsai people need to be transplanted into better soil. They need to be included in networks of productivity and exchange. Just as it is foolhardy to make face-to-face community a matter of market exchange, so too is it foolhardy to view commercial society as face-to-face community writ large.

My Application

With all this in mind, what do we make of the story? I begin with a question: If the story is about people being inspired to share with others based on the actions of Jesus and the disciples, where did the bread and fish come from that the people had stashed away? The bread came from the labor of clearing a field, planting seeds, nourishing a crop of wheat, harvesting the crop, adding ingredients to make dough, and then baking that dough into bread. The fish came from putting a boat into the water, dropping a net, hauling in a catch, salting and preserving the fish, and then retrieving the fish for such an occasion. Because of human imagination and labor, people had something they could share with others in face-to-face community.

Jesus inspired generosity by offering the loaves and fish. Elsewhere in the New Testament, Jesus tells us we will accomplish much greater things than he did. If generosity in face-to-face community is first grounded in productive labor, then how much greater can the generosity be if each of us were radically more productive, generating more to share? We can’t be in community with millions of other people. But we can be sure that bonsai people are given better soil and included in networks of exchange and productivity, making the most of their imagination and labor, allowing them to be generous with each other in face-to-face community.

I think Palmer is right about scarcity and abundance in the sense that we too often mistake want for need. Our drive for these “needs” inclines us to depersonalize others, abuse nature, and become stingy with what we have been given. This is not to say the only things we are to pursue are minimalist needs. Rather, we must prioritize our wants in relation to other considerations within the Kingdom of God. We need to be grateful for what we have. When superfluous wants to rise to the status of needs, we experience a scarcity created by our imagination. We become fearful and turned inward. Community is lost.

Leadership for community is not just about inspiring generosity. It is also about inspiring and creating the optimal conditions for expanding abundance, about ever-increasing the fruitfulness of the garden in ways that honor God. Like the woodcarver, it requires delving deep into the reality of our context (economics in this case) to know how to act truthfully.

 

Questions

In what ways have you felt scarcity? When have you felt scarcity the strongest? When have you been most aware of abundance? What do these experiences teach us about action in our daily existence?

 Does my critique of Palmer ring true with you? Why or why not?

 What do you think Jesus intended to communicate with his actions on this occasion?

 

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The Active Life - 6. “Jesus in the Desert": The Temptations of Action. Parker Palmer

Continuing our series on Parker Palmer's The Active Life: A Spirituality of Work, Creativity, and Caring, we look at Chapter 6, "' Jesus in the Desert': The Temptations of Action." The story in this chapter is the temptation of Jesus in the desert as given in Luke 4:1-15, (Jerusalem Bible, modified by Palmer with inclusive language.)

Temptations of Jesus in the Desert

Filled with Holy Spirit, Jesus left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit through the wilderness, being tempted by the devil for forty days. During that time he ate nothing and at the end he was hungry. Then the devil said to him, "If you are the Chosen One, tell this stone to turn into a loaf." But Jesus replied, "Scripture says: 'People do not live on bread alone.'"

Then leading him to a height, the devil showed him in a moment of time all the kingdoms of the world and said to him, "I will give you all this power and the glory of these kingdoms, for it has been committed to me and I give it to anyone I choose. Worship me, then, and it shall all be yours." But Jesus answered him, "Scripture says, 'You must worship the Lord your God, and serve God alone.'"

Then he led him to Jerusalem and made him stand on the parapet of the Temple. "If you are the Chosen One," he said to him "throw yourself down from here, for Scripture says: 'God will put angels in charge of you to guard you,' and again: 'They will hold you up on their hands in case you hurt your foot against a stone.'" But Jesus answered him, "It has been said: 'You must not put the Lord your God to the test.'"

Having exhausted all these ways of tempting him, the devil left him, to return at the appointed time.

Jesus, with the power of the Spirit in him, returned to Galilee; and his reputation spread throughout the countryside. He taught in their synagogues and everyone praised him. (100)

So far, Palmer has used stories from outside the Christian tradition for his reflections. We are so familiar with Christian stories it is hard to see them anew. As we turn this story from Luke, he wants us to listen carefully to the story and not to minimize the struggle and the suffering presented in the story, both for Jesus and, by implication, for us. He also reminds us that "The temptations story makes it clear that God's Spirit is not safe but dangerous, that those who act on the Spirit's urging will sometimes find themselves hungry and thirsty and filled with fear." (102) Reflecting on last week's story by Martin Buber, Palmer wonders:

"Is the devil in this biblical story an angel who tried to set things right but refused to learn from his failure? Is this devil still trying to set things right by finding an ally who is willing to risk the same mistake? Let us keep these questions alive while we explore the temptations that Jesus faced as he embarked on his active life." (103)

Turn This Stone to Bread

Palmer says this is, in part, the temptation to prove our identity. The devil begins, "If you are the Chosen One, …"

"Jesus does not regard himself as accountable for his calling to any voice except God's, so in his refusal to "prove" anything to the devil he is actually proving that his is the Chosen One as he himself understands it." (106)

But there is more. It is a temptation to be relevant, to meet a surface need.

"Like the woodcarver, who fasted not merely from food but from praise and criticism, gain and success, Jesus' real need is for inward confirmation of his mission, a confirmation he is more likely to fine in the emptiness of fasting than in gratification of bodily needs." (107)

By pressing to be relevant, we can sabotage true needs. "The temptation to be relevant is often the temptation to deal with only the external illusion of a problem and ignore its internal truth." (108)

I Will Give You Power

Palmer says, "The power that tempts us is never power with or for others, but always power over something or someone." (109) The imagery of "height," being above it all, is critical here. Height gives us two illusions.

"The first illusion is that once we are above it all we need not be immersed in the suffering of those who are under our power. … The second illusion is that a power that keeps us above it all is a power that will not corrupt us." (109)

But possibly the most disarming response to the devil's offer would have been to ask the question, "Does this guy really have the thing he says he can give me?" (110) Too often, we strive for things believing they will bring us benefits beyond the thing itself … freedom, status, belonging, or meaning. What is being offered is not capable of delivering what is promised. Palmer remarks that, "Were Jesus to worship the devil in this case, it would not be so much immoral as just plain foolish." (111) Such temptations should not entrap us, yet they so easily do.

Throw Yourself Down

Palmer notes that Jesus was "led" to these various tests by the devil and that it is interesting that Jesus offers no resistance. Earlier in the chapter, he says that the root Latin word for temptation, "tempartare," means to touch, to try or test, to feel experimentally. (103)  Palmer writes:

"… Resisting temptations does not mean refusing to go into place where one is tempted, does not mean evading the quandaries of one's life. We must go to those places because we have to, because they are necessary way station on the journey, because the journey requires energy that should not be squandered on fighting the journey itself. The real work is to go where we are led, to see what is there, to respond out of our own truth." (112)

Once again, Palmer thinks that Jesus' response is not out of an ethical "ought" but out of wisdom concerning the circumstances. "I do not think it would be morally wrong to test God by jumping off a high building to see if God would save you. It would be stupid." (113) To me, Palmer is not very clear about what he means in this discussion. I gather that he is saying that God could intervene, but God does not intervene to protect our petty agendas. God intervenes to further God's agenda. Acting as though we have the power to compel God to serve our ends is stupidity. That, at least, makes sense to me.

Palmer writes that "Henry Nouwen calls this third temptation the temptation to be spectacular, and it may be the most difficult of the three to resist." (113) He writes:

"This is, perhaps, the temptation to be charismatic, to inspire the sort of awe in people that leaves your ego continually inflated but that lacks the obligation that might pull you back to earth." (113)

The Temptation to be Inadequate

Palmer closes with this important observation in the chapter's final section.

"… But the temptation that afflicts many of us is that of weak ego—the temptation to think of ourselves as irrelevant, powerless, and utterly mundane, as people in whom Satan would never have the slightest interest.

On the surface, the temptations of the strong ego and the weak ego seem quite contrary to one another. But paradoxically, their origins and outcomes are the same. Both destroy our capacity for right action because both proceed from the same mistaken premise: the assumption that effective action requires us to be relevant, powerful, and spectacular, that only by being so can we have a real impact on the world." (114)

And later:

"Right action requires only that we respond faithfully to our inner truth and to the truth around us." (115)

But this is not the end of the temptation problem. Anyone who rightly rejects the call to be relevant, powerful, and spectacular will end up compellingly impacting people. Such a person will receive praise, just as news of Jesus spread through the countryside and he received praise. Then we are tempted to pursue praise. This passage was especially insightful about such praiseworthy people:

"There are two problems at work here. One is the public's tendency to project onto this man a quality that they want to possess but are unable to find in themselves, so they burden their hero with the impossible task of living out a part of their lives for them. The other problem is that their hero, like most of us, may find the hero role attractive, may seek to keep those projections coming, may even be willing to give up the solitary life that he finds so valuable for the sake of praise and fame – as I might, if given the chance." (118)

And finally:

"Right action demands that we find a deeper and truer source of energy and guidance than relevance, power, and spectacle can provide." (119)

 

Questions

In what ways have you experienced the temptation to be relevant, powerful, and spectacular? Have you experienced the temptation to be inadequate? How so?

Can you think of people in your own life who seem to be both the extremes of the temptations of Christ and the temptation to be inadequate? How would you characterize their lives?

Previous/Next

[Index]

Saturday Links

 1. The High Calling published an article I wrote. I linked it earlier, but here it is again in an act of shameless self-promotion. It goes to some core issues I'm trying to put into a book. Six Ideas on How to Lead Congregations to Integrate Work and Discipleship

2. Should Pastors Know How Much Church Members Give?

A recent study found that churches where pastors know how much is donated and by whom were more likely to be doing well financially. However, only half of the 3,000 responding congregations (and only 39 percent of evangelical ones) told the Lake Institute on Faith and Giving that their pastors knew this information.

What experts said (starting with "yes" and moving to "no" ): ...

3. Model for megacities? Mexico City cleans up its air.

... With urbanization advancing, economies expanding, and climate change a concern, Mexico City has emerged as an unlikely environmental example for cities in developing countries suffering similar air quality issues.

Mexico City recorded only eight days with air quality considered "good" in 1992. That compares with 248 "good" air days in 2012, reflecting the success of initiatives to relocate industry, kick clunkers off the capital's streets, encourage cleaner technologies, and expand public transit and cycling options. ...

4. Unmanned Drones May Have Their Greatest Impact on Agriculture

Talk about beating swords into plowshares. The mention of drones may conjure up images of Star Wars-like spacecraft or hell-fire war machines. But the controversial technology may prove to have its greatest impact in a peaceful endeavor: farming. ...

... The market for agricultural drones lies in the technology's ability to provide farmers with a bird's-eye view of their land. Historically, farmers have walked their land to survey it—looking for areas that need more fertilizer or water. More recently many have begun using small passenger planes to look at their lots from the air. But since airplane rental and fuel costs can quickly run into five figures, there's strong demand for cheaper alternatives. ...

... "Eighty percent of the utilization, once we are allowed to have Unmanned Aircraft Systems in the national airspace, in the first 10 years is going to be in precision agriculture," said Michael Toscano, CEO of AUVSI. "You will have a situation where you can spray crops by a UAS that flies 2 or 3 feet above the plants. You can control the downwash because you can put the pesticides on the plants and not in the ground where it gets to the groundwater."

"It sounds trivial but those numbers really add up a lot," said Rory Paul of Volt Aerial Robotics. "If we could save farms 1 percent on inputs like herbicide and pesticide and increase their yields by 1 percent, you are looking at multibillion dollar savings."...

5. Fascinating piece about the The Historical Horror of Childbirth

... Such stories were not at all shocking, as a woman's chances of dying during childbirth were between one and two percent -for each birth. If a woman gave birth to eight or ten children, her chances of eventually dying in childbirth were pretty high. The infant mortality rate was even higher. The chances of a child dying before his fifth birthday were estimated to be around 20 percent, depending on the community (accurate records are scarce). In addition to the fear of death or the fear of the child dying, there was no pain relief during labor, except for whisky in some places. ...

6. "INDIA will soon have a fifth of the world's working-age population." India's moment

7. 'Late-life crisis' hits the over-60s

"Of the 33% who went through a crisis, bereavement was the most common trigger, followed by personal illness or injury."

8. Hispanic High School Graduates Pass Whites in Rate of College Enrollment

 

9. Atlantic Cities asks the question that has interested me for years: Why Do So Many People Think Gun Violence Is Getting Worse?

"Twenty years into this safer era, we still don't know quite how we got here. Perhaps in absence of a logical narrative, many Americans simply find it hard to believe this is true."

10. People Don't Wear A Shocking Amount Of Their Clothes.

"The average person only wears about 20% of the clothing in his or her closets. Most clothing goes unworn because it's the result of an impulse buy or doesn't fit correctly, Ray A. Smith at the Wall Street Journal reports."

11. This week was the 20th anniversary of the birth of the World Wide Web. The Day Distance Disappeared

12. Great piece! The Tech Trends to Fear the Most: It's Not All Good

13. The market 'bubble' you've never heard of: "Some economists are worried that farmland prices are nearing bubble territory. How bad can it be if no one's heard of it?"

14. Michael Barone says College Bubble Bursts After Decades of Extravagance

15. Whatever happened to these Fortune 500 companies? "Here are seven companies from the first Fortune 500 that have since been merged, split up, or put out to pasture."

16. Dwight Lee has a thought-provoking piece about The Two Moralities of Ebenezer Scrooge.

17. The global economy: Welcome to the post-BRIC world

18. Development finance in Africa

19. Toxic Waste Sites Take Toll on Millions in Poor Nations

New studies attempt to quantify just how harmful the rampant exposure to lead and other chemicals is in the developing world.

20. James Pethokoukis with a provocative article about income inequality: Why A Decline In Income Inequality Would Be Bad News

Why has income inequality been rising in advanced economies — it's not just the US, people — over the past few decades? The economic consensus mostly explains the phenomenon as a race between accelerating technological change and expanding education. And the rise of inequality shows, as JPMorgan economist Mike Feroli puts it in a new report, that the "pace of technological advance has outstripped the ability of the educational system to supply the human capital skills needed to utilize this technology, leading to out-sized earnings gains for those who have such skills (the so-called college wage premium)."...

Six Ideas on How to Lead Congregations to Integrate Work and Discipleship

The High Calling: Six Ideas on How to Lead Congregations to Integrate Work and Discipleship

“How can we create a congregation where work and discipleship are truly integrated?” This is a question I am hearing more often, even though much has been written about a theology of work in recent years.

Pastors and church leaders are looking for a programmatic strategy. I don’t think there is one. ...

This is a piece I wrote for the High Calling. They posted it yesterday. What do you think? What ideas do you have?

The Active Life - 5. “The Angel”: Action, Failure and Suffering. Parker Palmer

Today we move to chapter five, "The Angel": Action, Failure and Suffering, in Parker Palmer's The Active Life: A Spirituality of Work, Creativity, and Caring. This chapter features a story by Martin Buber, "The Angel and the World's Dominion."

To preface this story, Palmer notes that Martin Buber was a Jewish philosopher, and what he writes comes out of that perspective:

From the outset Jews have had to confront suffering and holocaust, to wrestle continually with the stark question, Why? In the midst of Jewish history, Hasidism arose as a mystical affirmation of the spark of light that is always found in the heart of darkness, a spark that can ignite human hope and action even in the deadliest of times. (79)

Here is Buber's story.

The Angel and the World's Dominion

Martin Buber

There was a time when the Will of the Lord, Whose hand has the power to create and destroy all things, unleashed an endless torrent of pain and sickness over the earth. The air grew heavy with the moisture of tears, and a dim exhalation of sighs clouded it over. Even the legions that surround God's throne were not immune to the hovering sadness. One angel, in fact, was so deeply moved by the sufferings he saw below, that his soul grew quite restless. When he lifted his voice in song with the others, a note of perplexity sounded among the strains of pure faith; his thoughts rebelled and contended with the Lord. He could no longer understand why death and deprivation need serve as connecting links in the great Chain of Events. Then one day he felt to his horror that the eye of All-Being was piercing his own eye and uncovering the confusion in his heart. Pulling himself together, he came before the Lord, but when he tried to talk, his throat dried up. Nevertheless, the Lord called him by name and gently touched his lips. The angel began to speak. He begged God to place the administration of the Earth in his hands for a year's time, that he might lead it to an era of well-being. The angelic bands trembled at this audacity. But at that same moment Heaven grew bright with the radiance of God's smile. He looked at the supplicant with great love, as He announced His agreement. When the angel stood up again, he too was shining.

And so a year of joy and sweetness visited the Earth. The shining angel poured the great profusion of his merciful heart over the most anguished of her children, on those who were benumbed and terrified by want. The groans of the sick and dying were no longer heard in the land. The angel's companion in the steely armor, who only a short time before had been rushing and roaring through the air, stepped aside now, waiting peevishly with lowered sword, relieved of his official duties. The earth floated through a fecund sky that left her with the burden of new vegetation.  When summer was at its height, people moved singing through the full, yellow fields; never had such abundance existed in the memory. At harvest time, it seemed likely that the walls would burst or the roofs fly off, if they were going to find room to store their crops.

Proud and contented, the shining angel basked in his own glory. For by the time the first snow of winter covered the valleys, and dominion over the earth reverted into God's hands, he had parceled out such an enormous bounty that the people of the earth would surely be enjoying his gifts for many years to come.

But one cold day, late in the year, a multitude of voices rose heavenwards in a great cry of anguish. Frightened by the sound, the angel journeyed down to the Earth and, dressed as a pilgrim, entered the first house along the way. The people there, having threshed the grain and ground it into flour, had then started baking bread—but, alas, when they took the bread out of the oven, it fell to pieces, and the pieces were unpalatable; they filled the mouth with a disgusting taste, like clay. And this was precisely what the Angel found in the second house and in the third and everywhere that he set foot. People were lying on the floor, tearing their hair and cursing the King of the World, who had deceived their miserable hearts with His false blessing.

The angel flew away and collapsed at his Master's feet. "Lord," he cried, "help me to understand where my power and judgment were lacking."

Then God raised his voice and spoke: Behold a truth which is known to me, and only to me from the beginning of time, a truth too deep and dreadful for your delicate, generous hands, my sweet apprentice —it is this, that the Earth must be nourished with putrefaction and covered with shadows that its seeds may bring forth — and it is this, that souls must be made fertile with flood and sorrow, that through them the Great Work may be born." (79-81)

Where Angels Fear to Tread

So was the angel caring and compassionate or full of arrogance? Palmer believes he was both:

Our action is often a mixture of ego and innocence, and we will not become whole until we can embrace that simple fact. If we wait for purity of motive, we will never act, or our action will be immaterial. If we abandon hope for a 'second innocence,' our action will merely multiply cynicism. (82)

And later:

Our most constructive impulse is often accompanied by a destructive impulse, made all the more destructive by the fact that we usually remain oblivious to this sinister energy within us. (82)

This duality was present in the angel, as it is with us. But Palmer reminds us that the angel is not the same at the end of the story as he was at the beginning. If we embrace the presence of this tension, we can grow to greater wisdom as the angel did.

Some see the angel motivated by compassion at the story's start, but Palmer does not. Compassion means being with another. But the angel's "… relation to that suffering was both visual and vertical: he saw it rather than touched it, and he kept himself above it rather than entering into it." (83) Only at the end of the story is he motivated by the horror to "journey down to earth" to understand what has happened.

And here is the rub. "What we usually learn, once we are there, is that there is no "fix" for the person who suffers, only the slow and painful process of walking through the suffering to whatever lies on the other side." (84) Our attempts at "fixing" things is really an effort to distance ourselves from the pain of others.

If you take my advice, and do it right, you will get well and I will be off the hook. But if you do not follow my advice, or do not follow it properly, I am off the hook nonetheless: I have done the best I could, and your continued suffering is clearly your fault. (85)

Meaningful action requires coming close to others with compassion.

The Healing Power of Failure

Key to the angel's transformation is his willingness to enter into his failure, to understand it, and learn from it. He does not run away from it and minimize it. Palmer tells a wonderful story about a wealthy white suburban congregation yoked with an urban black congregation. After three years of making money and skills available, nothing meaningful happened for the black congregation. The white congregation asked Palmer to do a sociological analysis to help them "fix the problem." Palmer writes:

… In fact, I did not view the situation as a problem to be solved. I suggested that in a congregation as wealthy as theirs, among people with so much power, the one kind of poverty that they could experience was the poverty of being unable to achieve the results they wanted. Their frustration with their sister church was, perhaps as close as they would ever get to the daily poverty of inner city blacks who can achieve so few of their cherished goals. (88)

Only by thoroughly embracing failure can we grow in understanding. Palmer concludes this section with this observation:

Rather than holding his [the angel] failure at arm's length and trying to move on, he entered fully into the pain of it and sought help from the only source left. That is all we can do when we fail so miserably – but if we do it, it is enough. (90)

What Kind of God is This?

Palmer notes that many people are put off by the characterization of God in the story. God seems to be in total control and yet allows seemingly unnecessary cruelty. Why did God not tell the angel if God knew how the story would end?

Palmer counters that the angel did know something of the truth from the start. The problem was that the angel "could no longer understand why death and deprivation need to serve as connecting links in the great Chain of Events."

… The problem from the beginning is that the angel knew the truth but "could no longer understand" it. That is, he refused to accept what he already knew.

Some of us do a lot of that, I think. We know things that we do not want to accept, and so we act as if we do not know them – until our actions and their outcomes force us to acknowledge what we already knew. … (91)

Furthermore,

… We are often ready to receive a false blessing no matter what the eventual cost; it takes unusual maturity to turn down. … (91-92)

Palmer writes:

So Buber's God might be acquitted of irresponsibility on at least two counts. One, God gave the angel freedom, even to mess up. Two, even if God had reminded the angel at the outset that life demands suffering, the angel still would have tried to circumvent that truth. But those understandings of God do not go deep enough. The truth about God in this story – and, I believe, about God in our lives – is far more radical and unsettling: God is in this mess with us and has the same unfulfilled yearnings that make our human hearts ache. (92)

I have no doubt many will find this controversial. Personally, I think there is an angle from which this must be true. If God has created beings with whom he desires a loving relationship, then those beings must be able to choose to love God (or not) freely. God can still be sovereign with confidence that God's love will prevail and still be open-ended in honoring our freedom to choose, including us as co-creative partners of the new reality God is calling us.

Jesus says, "I am the vine and you are the branches." Vines do not bear fruit. Branches do. It is through his community that Christ makes himself known. Paul says that we are the body, the physical presence, of Christ. Again, it is through Christ's community that God is made known. In the Buber story, God awakens something in the angel to take creative action, not God acting independently or sending an automaton to execute instructions. "… God in this story is a trusting and risking parent who gives the child the power and freedom to live his or her life to the fullest, no matter what." (94)

A Great Work to be Born

In the final section, Palmer writes:

On one level, the lesson God has to teach is simply the truth about nature itself: Seeds do not grow if they are not "nourished with decay." That is what composting and fertilizing are all about. By ridding earth of decay for a year, the angel destroyed the conditions that allow true grain to grow, and the result was grain that could not nourish people once it was made into bread. This law of nature, God tells the angel, is the law of human nature as well. Decay and shadow, flood and sorrow, must fertilize souls as well as seeds if the fruit of our inner life is to nourish us and others.

But God's teaching has a more immediate, less abstract, meaning. With it, God is trying to help the angel understand the very process that God and the angel are going through. The Great Work is the work the angel is engaged in – the work of developing compassion by suffering the fires of failure. God is engaged in this Great Work with us, continually expanding the scope of God's own compassion and experiencing the failures of love. (95)

With all this being true, there is hope that this inescapable reality can somehow be escaped. Enter the vision of a messiah. God does enter into our circumstances to overcome this reality, not over and against us, but with and through us. It is a process of sanctification and learning to become more compassionate.

 

Questions

What parts of the story resonate with you? Which parts trouble you? Why?

Can you recall when you or others sought to achieve great works only to end in disappointment or even horror? How have those experiences shaped you?

What do you think of how Palmer frames God? What encourages you or troubles you about seeing God in this way?

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The Active Life - 4. "The Woodcarver": A Model for Right Action. Parker Palmer

This week we are looking at chapter 4, “’The Woodcarver’: A Model for Right Action,” in Parker Palmer’s book, The Active Life. Palmer draws on another story by the ancient Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu.

 

The Woodcarver.

 

Khing, the master carver, made a bell stand

Of prescious wood. When it was finished,

All who saw it were astounded. The said it must be

The work of spirits.

The Prince of Lu said to the master carver:

“What is your secret?”

 

Khling replied: “I am only a workman:

I have no secret. There is only this:

When I began to think about the work you commanded

I guarded my spirit, did not expend it

On trifles, that were no to the point.

I fasted in order to set

My heart at rest.

After three days fasting, I had forgotten gain and success.

After five days

I had forgotten criticism.

After seven days

I had forgotten my body

With all its limbs.

 

“By this time all thought of your Highness

And of the court had faded away.

All that might distract me from the work

Had vanished.

I was collected in the single thought

Of the bell stand.

 

“Then I went to the forest

To see the trees in their own natural state.

When the right tree appeared before my eyes,

The bell stand also appeared in it, clearly, beyond doubt.

All I had to do was to put forth my hand

And begin.

 

“If I had not met this particular tree

There would have been

No bell stand at all.

 

“What happened?

My own collected thought

Encountered the hidden potential in the wood;

From this live encounter came the work

Which you ascribe to the spirits. (55-56)

Palmer suspects that many people will find this story a bit romantic. Does it really apply to our contemporary work world?

Many people feel hampered by the hierarchies in which we often must work, by institutional structures that curtail the independence that we think we need to do our creative best. But few people work in a setting as demanding as the woodcarver’s. … When I ask Chinese scholars what would have happened if Khing had failed to produce a bell stand acceptable to the prince, they usually answer with a sweeping movement of the forefinger across the front of the throat. (57)

Few of us work under such demanding circumstances, yet the woodcarver seems to take an odd approach in completing his task. After years of reflection on this story, Palmer writes that he sees four “critical junctures” in the story where an element of work is revealed that we can learn from. “The four elements are motives, skills and gifts, ‘the other,’ and results.” (58) Palmer unpacks these four elements during the rest of the chapter.

Motives

Each action has a motive behind it. Khing is not making the bell stand out out of some whimsical desire to create but in response to a command by the prince. He must do this to survive. This may not be the most desirable motivation for action, but it is what it is. However, once the action is set in motion, Khing can choose how to complete his task. He begins by fasting to cleanse himself of all the destructive pressures and motivations hindering him from authentically engaging in his task. By forgetting the details of his present context, he was able to re-member … join back together the authentic pieces of his identity … and act out of who he truly was. Palmer writes:

 … If we are to transcend the motives and context that so often limit and distort our action, we must enter into our versions of fasting, forgetting, and dying. (64)

As I read this section, my mind kept going to this passage in the Bible:

Col 3:22-24

Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything, not only while being watched and in order to please them, but wholeheartedly, fearing the Lord. Whatever your task, put yourselves into it, as done for the Lord and not for your masters, since you know that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward; you serve the Lord Christ.  NRSV

R. Paul Stevens notes that ministry is defined not by what we do but by who we serve. It is critical to continually “re-member” our identity as servants of Christ in the face of a world that endlessly seeks to dismember us with other motives.

Skills and Gifts.

Khing resists the adulation thrust upon him for his work and, thereby, the temptation to unreflectively throw himself into his task. His skill is not superhuman. His workmanship comes from experience, practice, and awareness. People often give such accolades (“the work of the spirits”) to an accomplished craftsman because ascribing high-quality work to supernatural sources frees them from reflecting on how poorly devoted they have been to their own development. Khing is not letting others off the hook.

Palmer goes on to reflect on a distinction between innate abilities we possess and skills we have learned. He writes:

The skills we are most aware of possessing are often those we have acquired only through long hours of study and practice, at considerable financial or personal cost. Precisely because these skills once cost us effort to acquire, and still cost us effort to employ, we are acutely aware of owning them. Ironically, these self-conscious skills are often not our leading strengths; if they were, they would not be so effortful. But they are our strengths upon which we sometimes build our identities and our careers – though we build on an anxious, uncertain foundation. Meanwhile, our native, instinctive gifts either languish unused and unappreciated or get used unconsciously without being named and claimed. (66)

Concerning the woodcarver, Palmer observes:

… the woodcarver possesses several other gifts [other than technical woodcarver skills], all of which are essential to the mastery he demonstrates: the capacity to wait patiently for insight to emerge, the capacity to trust in the outcomes of uncertain process, the capacity to take risks under pressure, the capacity to speak his truth even when it is not what people want to hear. (67)

To discover our innate abilities, Palmer suggests we might want to reflect on our earliest childhood memories and remember how we spent our time. What things pleased us, and what things could not abide? By returning to early memories of ourselves, we can recapture what we naturally did before we were socialized to conform to particular norms or ground our identity in acquired skills. I was counseled to do this a few years ago. I think the exercise was one of the most important acts of self-discovery I have ever done.

The Other

Action always involves an “other,” whether other people or other objects. “Right action requires knowledge of the other’s nature, which means knowledge of its potentials and limits, of what it can and cannot do.” (70)

In this section, I think Palmer is wrestling with a polarity. We are not intended to leave the world untouched in a pristine primitive state, but neither are we to treat the “other” as only raw material to be shaped for utilitarian purposes. In this sense, I’m reminded of Darrell Cosden (Theology of Work), who reminds us that the natural order is simultaneously the raw material from which we fashion artifacts and our home. Embracing either pole without the other is dehumanizing. Our human existence is one of correctly discerning how we work in harmony with the other, even as we reshape it.

Results

Palmer does not deny that achieving results is important, but he pushes back against the idea that the only meaningful, or even primary, thing is the results.

“… As long as ‘effectiveness’ is the ultimate standard by which we judge our actions, we will act only toward ends we are sure we can achieve. People who undertake projects of real breadth and depth are very unlikely to be “effective,” since effectiveness is measured by short-term results (never mind the fact that such people may be creating cultural legacies by their “failures”). But people with small visions will win the effectiveness awards, since those projects are so insignificant that they can almost always ‘succeed’ (never mind the fact that they contribute nothing of real merit to the commonweal). (75)

Palmer tells of a friend who said, “I have never asked myself if I was being effective, but only if I was being faithful.” (76) But Palmer goes on to add:

Again, results are not irrelevant. We rightly care about outcomes; we have to live with them, and being accountable for them is part of right action. But to make results the primary measure of action is a sure path to either inanity or insanity. The only standard that can guide and sustain us in action worth taking is whether the action corresponds to the reality of the situation, including the reality of our own inward nature.

The paradox is that faithful action does get results. …  (78-79)

Finally, Palmer reminds us that when we act, we are not only shaping the “other” but also ourselves.

 

Questions

Do you feel trapped in your work, compelled to do work that may not be your first choice, or work for which your employer is seeking to motivate you in ways that dismember your true identity? What do you think of Palmer’s idea of “re-membering” ourselves?

Have you ever deeply reflected on your childhood to discover what things brought you pleasure or dissatisfaction? What does such reflection tell you about the innate abilities God has given you?

In what ways do you experience a tension between seeing the world as raw material and as a home that nourishes us?

How have you seen the tension between results and faithfulness play out in your own life?

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The Active Life - 3. "Active Life": The Shadow Side. Parker Palmer

Today we are looking at the third chapter in Parker Palmer's book the Active Life, "Active Life": The Shadow Side. The first two chapters lay out preliminary thoughts regarding contemplative and active lives. The final six chapters begin with a piece of ancient wisdom, followed by Palmer's reflections. Today we are looking at a piece by the Chuang Tzu, a Chinese philosopher living in the fourth century B.C.E. It is called, "Active Life." Palmer uses a portion of a version translated by Thomas Merton and John C. H. Wu (to which Palmer has made some gender-inclusive edits.) Here is the translation. Following it is a video of the complete work as Merton presented it:

 

Active Life by Chuang Tzu

 

If an expert does not have some problem to vex him, he is unhappy!

If a philosopher's teaching is never attacked, she pines away!

If critics have no one on whom to exercise their spites, they are unhappy.

All such people are prisoners in the world of objects.

 

He who wants followers, seeks political power.

She who wants reputation, holds an office.

The strong man looks for weights to lift.

The brave woman looks for an emergency in which she can show bravery.

The swordsman wants a battle in which he can swing his sword.

People past their prime prefer a dignified retirement, in which they may seem profound.

People experienced in law seek difficult cases to extend the application of laws.

Liturgists and musicians like festivals in which they parade their ceremonious talents.

The benevolent, the dutiful, are always looking for chances to display virtue.

 

Where would the gardener be if there were no more weeds?

What would become of business without a market of fools?

Where would the masses be if there were no pretext for getting jammed together and making noise?

What would become of labor if there were no superfluous objects to be make?

 

Produce! Get results! Make money! Make friends! Make changes!

Or you will die of despair.

 

Distilling the poem's critique to one sentence, Palmer writes: "Too much of our action is really reacation." He says,

"Such 'doing' does not flow from free and independent hearts, he says, but depends on external provocation. It does not come from our sense of who we are and what we want to do, but from our anxious reading of how others define us and of what the world demands. When we react this way we do not act humanly; we become cogs in a machine whose every move is forced by what is happening elsewhere in the interlocked system of cogs. 'All such people are prisoners in the word of objects." (39)

We seek situations and manipulate the world into scenes that showcase our skill. The world and the people in it become objects we use to get praise and find meaning. It makes us feel alive. And it is addictive.

Palmer writes:

At root, a professional is one who makes a profession of faith – faith in something larger and wiser than his or her own powers. The true professional is the opposite of someone who makes objects of other people by creating dependencies. Instead, the true professional is a person whose action points beyond his or her self to the underlying reality, that hidden wholeness, on which we all can rely. (44)

This is the positive side of the professional, but there is a dark side as well. In one passage, Palmer asks, "What meaning would life have for some mental health professionals if there were not people who depended on their help?" (43) Should the health professional actually be successful in increasing mental health, demand for her expertise would diminish, and therefore her identity. To a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and there must be nails if the hammer is to have meaning. Only if you see yourself as something more than a hammer do you have the freedom to hammer nails as needed but then to engage in other actions as circumstances change without losing identity.

Another challenge the reactive life presents is the tendency to create self-fulfilling prophecies. "Action based on false beliefs has the power to bring those falsehoods into being." (45) Someone addicted to bravery seeks out and creates circumstances where bravery is required. The fighter seeks out and creates conflicts where fighting is needed. The helper seeks out and creates situations where help is needed. We tend to shape the world to fit our professional skill, reinforcing our identity and creating a world where more peril, conflict, and need exists than need be.

Palmer warns that "… 'goodness' driven primarily by the actor's needs is unlikely to be good at all. Such goodness is often imposed on people who have no desire for it and become objects of the actor's self-serving charity." (47) As someone who has been a student of economic development for most of my adult life, I can't say strongly enough how important this statement is and how resistant so much of the Church is to hear these words.

I remember one pastor telling how his Church would prepare Christmas dinners and buy presents to deliver, in person, to families who lived in a Section 8 housing complex. What began to dawn on him was that fathers were never home when the meals and gifts were delivered. Why? The fathers slipped out the backdoor in humiliation about being unable to provide for their household. The program was revised. The Church still prepared meals, but recipient parents came to the Church to collect a meal for a minimal fee and then brought it home to their families as providers of the feast. The Church bought gifts, but parents came to a store where, for a minimal fee, they could select toys to bring home to their children. Until we escape the lie that what makes us feel helpful is always helpful, we are caught in a self-fulfilling prophecy where our "help" never really helps, wounding people in need while simultaneously generating more opportunities for us to feel helpful to people who are trapped in need, in part due to our own comfortable illusions.

Palmer closes the chapter with an interesting reflection on how we use the verb "make." We make money, make friends, make changes, make time, make love, make peace, make a deal, make our way, make things right, make meaning, make a living and … the all-inclusive … make "it." (49) We see ourselves as fabricators of everything around us, including things over which we clearly have no control. He says, "We seem to regard much of the world as raw material that waits passively to be given shape by our own designs and energies …" (49) While there is no doubt that part of what we do as humans is fabricate, it is also true that we receive from the world things over which we have no control, from a world that is dynamic and shapes us. It is our false belief that we are in control, or ought to be in control, that leads to frenetic behavior and objectification of the world and others.

I thought one of Palmer's most important lines was, "True despair is the failure to learn before we die that the water eventually closes up over everything, that we never manage to leave the indelible marks of our dreams." (51) I'm reminded of Woody Allen saying, "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality by not dying." We have immortality in God, not through our work. Attempting to achieve immortality through work is a form of idolatry. It is an illusion. But when we embrace this limitation, we are freer to receive what has been given and to participate in transforming our physical and social world into more useful forms with joy and celebration, to be more alive in our work.

Questions

In what ways have you felt your life is driven by reaction? Do you sometimes feel objectified by others? In what ways do you think we might objectify others?

Can you recall instances of creating self-fulfilling prophecies in your own life or the life of others? What were the consequences?

How does Palmer's observation that "water eventually closes up over everything" make you feel? Does it feel more threatening or freeing? Why?

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The Active Life - 2. Action and Contemplation: A Living Paradox. Parker Palmer

Parker Palmer spent the first chapter of his book The Active Life defining the active and contemplative life. He sees the active life in terms of work, creativity, and caring. He briefly explores the dualism that often develops, favoring one. In Chapter 2, he wants us to see how the two are inseparably integrated. He describes it as a “living paradox.” I might have called it a polarity. Rather than “contemplation and action,” Palmer suggests it might be more helpful to speak in terms of “contemplation-and-action,” symbolizing the interconnectedness.

The Living Paradox

Throughout our spiritual formation, Palmer believes we often experience the paradox in terms of separation, moving to alternation, and finally moving to integration. We typically are drawn to one pole or the other. Activity can fly off into frenzy. Contemplation can become escapism. Excess creates a desire for balance, so we move to alternation. Burned out, we take a “vacation” from action to contemplate. Restored, we move back into action until we are so worn out that we move to a contemplative mode again.

While alternation is an improvement, integration is optimal. Palmer defines action and contemplation this way:

• Action – “I understand action to be any way that we can co-create reality with other beings and with the Spirit.” (17) And as we saw in the previous chapter, work, creativity, and caring are forms that our action takes.
• Contemplation – “I understand contemplation to be any way that we can unveil the illusions that masquerade as reality and reveal the reality behind the masks.” (17)

Both action and contemplation have at their root a “ceaseless drive to be fully alive,” but neglect of either undercut the drive for aliveness.

The Nature of Action

Palmer devotes the second part of Chapter 2 to “The Nature of Action.” He opens with this important observation.

“If you are unemployed, if you are forced to do work that brings neither enough money or recognition, if you are young and uncertain about where you are going, or if you are unhappily retired, one of the most painful questions anyone can ask you may be simply “What do you do?” If you are unprepared, if you have not reflected on your situation and found ground to stand on, that simple question can open a dangerous chasm beneath your feet and trigger fierce defenses. Why so?” (19)

His conclusion?

“Perhaps the primitive fear that some of us feel when we cannot answer the question ‘What do you do?’ comes from a deep, unconscious intuition that inaction is a sign of death. When we are not “doing” we are forcibly reminded of our own mortality; we experience a sort of dying through inactivity. But when we are acting we can say to the world and to ourselves that we are here, we are alive, we are making a difference. Indeed, by acting we imagine that we can leave something of ourselves behind, marks that might give us a kind of immortality. In raising a child or shaping an institution or writing a book we may carry the silent hope that our mortal lives can somehow defy the barriers of death.” (20)

But we cannot escape death, and death will sweep away all we have done. We should not count on our work to achieve immortality, but we must not err in another direction by becoming passive, dying before we are dead. God has made us for co-creative work in the world, but we do so as mortal creatures. Furthermore, pride often accompanies our work. Here we face a dilemma in avoiding prideful behavior but not to the point that withdraw from action for fear of pride. Action is risky. “The greatest risk in action is the risk of self-revelation, and that is also action’s greatest joy.” (22) It is in the risk of self-revelation that we are most fully alive.

Palmer distinguishes between Instrumental and expressive aspects of work:

• “The instrumental image, which dominates Western culture, portrays action as a means to predetermined ends, as an instrument or tool of our intentions. … Instrumental action traps us in a system of praise or blame, credit or shame, a system that gives primacy to goals and external evaluations, devalues the gift of self-knowledge, and diminishes our capacity to take the risks that may yield growth.” (23)
• “An expressive act is one that I take not to achieve a goal outside myself but to express a conviction, a leading, a truth that is within me. An expressive act is one taken because if I did not take it I would be denying my own insight, gift, nature.” (24)

Palmer’s concern is not that all action should be expressive but that life becomes deadening when all our action is collapsed into instrumental acts. Expressive action is how we contribute to the larger scheme of things because it brings our unique qualities into play.

The Nature of Contemplation

The third part of Chapter 2 is devoted to “The Nature of Contemplation.” Palmer reminds us that:

“Every action originates in some assessment of reality, no matter how mistaken. No action will have lasting effects if it is inconsistent with reality.” (25)

He also astutely points out that “Contemplation is difficult for many of us because we have invested so much in illusion.” (25) Illusions are usually a joint project between us and society. They keep things orderly. He highlights three circumstances that tend to promote contemplation.

Disillusionment – When someone lets us down, or when some vision we had fails, we become dis-illusioned. We see life more fully for what it is, or at least what it is not. Palmer says, “Pain is one of the sure signs that contemplation is happening.” (27) Contemplation may eventually lead to a happier reality, but emptiness and pain are frequently part of the journey.

Dislocation – “This happens when we are forced by circumstance to occupy a very different standpoint from our normal one, and our angle of vision suddenly changes to reveal a strange and threatening landscape.” (27) A change in our health or employment or sometimes just coming to the world through someone else’s eyes, breaks us out of our limited perspective into a more full-orbed view.

Unbidden solitude – Sometimes, we find ourselves in isolation from the collective life and the reality our community reinforces for us. Sometimes solitude is forced upon us. We may need to make our way without collective support for any number of reasons. But unlike the first two, solitude is something that can grow on us. In fact, disillusionment and dislocation can take us into deeper appreciation of solitude. It can render us less needy and more capable of authentically giving of ourselves. Palmer writes:

“The healthy community is one that leaves the solitude, the integrity, of each individual intact; if its members do not respect their own solitude, they will continually violate the solitude of others. The only thing we have to bring to community is ourselves, so the contemplative process of recovering our true selves in solitude is never selfish. It is ultimately the best gift we can give to others.” (29)

The Hidden Wholeness

In the final section of the chapter, Palmer writes about “The Hidden Wholeness.” We are frequently taught that wholeness can be found in escape or retreat from the world into ethereal abstractions. Palmer says no. It is found by entering more fully into the difficult reality of this world. The answer lies not in getting out of it but in getting into it. Instead of trying to outrun the “monsters” that frighten us, we must turn and embrace them, recognize them as part of us, and be willing to learn what they might teach us. He concludes the chapter with this:

“When we live a full life of contemplation-and-action, the monsters will always be aroused, and we will be compelled to search the depths. It is good to know that those very monsters can take us to the depths we need to explore. It is even better to know that in those depths we can find the hidden wholeness that unites and energizes us, the source and the power that make us fully alive.” (34)

Summary

To summarize, contemplation and action are poles in a polarity that bring wholeness. Through action, we participate in co-creating reality with others and the Spirit. Instrumental work is an inescapable part of our existence, but a life absent of expressive work fails to bring what is unique about ourselves into the mix. But our world is a mixture of truth and illusion. How do we know who we truly are and what we might authentically bring to the world?

Contemplation is what unmasks illusion and reveals truth. Contemplation is often painful, prompted as it often is by disillusionment, dislocation, and solitude. Yet our culture is all about pain avoidance. We are inclined to deny pain, to medicate it, or to seek escape. But only by entering deeply into these painful circumstances do we find truth. With a better appreciation for the truth, we are capable of more authentic action. That action will lead to more disillusionment, dislocation, and solitude, but it will also empower us to be more truly alive in all aspects of our lives.

 

Questions

Have you had the experience of moving from separation to alternation to integration? What happened that moved you along in this progression?

Do you identify with the scariness of being unable to say what you do? Does it unnerve you that you and all you’ve done will soon be forgotten after your death? Why do you think that frightens so many of us?

What experiences of disillusionment, dislocation, or solitude have you experienced as gateways to better understanding yourself and the world?

What do you think about Palmer’s idea of embracing the monsters within us? Does that empower you? Terrify you?

Previous/Next [Index]

The Active Life - 1. Spirituality in Action: On Being Fully Alive

(Today, I'm beginning an eight-week book study on Parker Palmer's, The Active Life: A Spirituality of Work, Creativity, and Caring at Pine Ridge Presbyterian Church from 11:30 to 12:30. If you are in the area and want to attend, please join us. Bring lunch if you like. In addition to the face-to-face study, I will post a blog on each chapter here at the Kruse Kronicle every Tuesday, hopefully broadening the conversation.)

Parker Palmer begins The Active Life with this statement: "This book – this exploration of work, creativity, and caring in the world of action – is the result of my long journey toward the knowledge that I am not a monk." (1) Writing a decade ago, Palmer points to a spiritual renaissance in monastic spirituality over the preceding thirty years, a development he attributes to the influence of notable people like Thomas Merton. He welcomes the positive contributions of this renaissance but finds some aspects troubling:

"In the spiritual literature of our time, it is not difficult to find the world of action portrayed as an arena of ego and power, while the world of contemplation is pictured as a realm of light and grace. I have often read, for example that the treasure of the "true self" can be found as we draw back from active life and enter into contemplative prayer. Less often have I read that this treasure can be found in our struggles to work, create, and care in the world of action.

Contemporary images of what it means to be spiritual tend to value the inward search over the outward act, silence over sound, solitude over interaction, centeredness and quietude and balance over engagement and animation and struggle. …" (2)

Palmer says that, like many others, he retreated into a contemplative life when the coherence of his active life became ambiguous. The contemplative life can become a counterweight to, or even an escape from, the activist orientation of our age instead of being an avenue for discovering significance in the active life.

This divide between the contemplative life and the active life has been with the Church almost from the beginning. The ancient Greeks considered work as a means to survival, while contemplation offered the opportunity for transcendence. That mindset influenced Christianity from an early date. Palmer writes:

"Rooted in this bias, the church and the university became the preeminent institutions of Western culture, in part because they harbored the life of contemplation in a world where the active life was merely what the masses did to survive." (6)

But with Enlightenment came the rise of science and technology:

"Now we can use the tools of action to change the world, to invent our own reality, to make an historical mark. Knowledge, once seen as an end in itself, becomes the pathway to personal virtue, social status, and even to "salvation" for many modern men and women."

There is a tendency in our time for people to either embrace one mode (active or contemplative) over and against the other or to compartmentalize the two. Palmer sees the two as a polarity where both poles must be embraced and celebrated, even though we may have a call that gravitates to one another. I don't think Palmer doubts for a minute that our culture has typically overemphasized the active life to the detriment of the contemplative life. But his concern here is that so many in the Church elevate the contemplative life in unhealthy ways as a response. He writes:

"I struggle with those parts of our spiritual tradition in which the energies of the active life are more feared than revered, pictured as wild horses to be brought under control rather than life-giving streams that flow from the source. The feelings of diminishment and guilt that such spiritualties can engender may have some short-term role as prods to self-discovery. But they have no-long-term place in the life of the spirit. People called to the active life need to nurture a spirituality that does not fear the vitalities of action." (7-8)

He then follows with this paragraph, which I think is key:

"The core message of all the great spiritual traditions is "be not afraid." Rather, be confident that life is good and trustworthy. In this light, the great failure is not that of leading a full and vital active life, with all the mistakes and suffering such a life will bring (along with its joys). Instead, the failure is to withdraw fearfully from the place to which one is called to squander the most precious of our birthrights – the experience of aliveness itself." (8)

Palmer says that most of us are not so much seeking meaning, though there is likely an element of this, but seeking the "rapture of being alive." He affirms this quest not in some "narcissistic celebration of self" but in the sense of being connected to life that transcends us.

Finally, Palmer identifies three forms the active life takes:

• Work – "Work is action driven by external necessity or demand. We work because we need to make a living, because we need to solve a problem, because we need to surmount to survive." (9)
• Creativity – "Creativity … is driven more by inner choice than by outer demand. … In creative action, our desire is not to "solve" or "succeed" or "survive" but to give birth to something new …" (9)
• Caring – Caring is freely chosen action where "… we aim not at giving birth to something new; we aim at nurturing, protecting, guiding, healing, or empowering something that already has life." (9-10)

These are not mutually exclusive categories and are often intertwined. Palmer acknowledges that these definitions may seem a little abstract, but that may be partly because they are so deeply embedded in everyday life … we barely notice them. He is also keen for us to know that while a deep richness to life is connected to each of these modes of action, so is there an opportunity for violence and destruction. Palmer writes:

"My aim in this book is to celebrate and criticize the active life, to explore its joys and pains, its problems and potentials, to understand the forces that both drive and deform our activity – but to do all this with reverence for the mystery of self-discovery and creation which is at the heart of human action." (11)

 

Some questions for discussion:

What are some moments when you have felt truly alive? Do you see any connection between those moments and the active or contemplative life? Do you agree with Palmer's statement that what we are seeking most is a sense of aliveness?

Does Palmer's framing of work, creativity, and caring ring true for you? My experience has been that the Church does a much better at identifying value in creativity and caring but much less so in work. Do you agree? Why do you think this is so?

Next in the series. [Index]

Saturday Links

1. The Economist has an interesting graph showing that capitalism has led to greater happiness in member countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (former Soviet Union countries excluding the three baltic countries.)

2. AEI has an informative piece on economic mobility in the United States: How's the American Dream doing? Well, which one?

There are two ways to define economic mobility: 1) absolute mobility, whether each generation is financially better off than the one before; and 2) relative mobility, whether you can change your income rank  vs. your parents. Most Americans probably think both measures important. We want to be more prosperous than mom and dad, but also be able to change our circumstances and make our dreams come true. ...

... A San Francisco Fed study – using data tracking families since 1968 — looks at both versions of the American Dream, finding one healthier than the other. Looking at absolute mobility, researchers Leila Bengali and Mary Daly find the United States "highly mobile." Over the sample period, 67% of US adults had higher family incomes than their parents, including 83% of those in the lowest birth quintile, or bottom 20% (versus 54% for children born into the top quintile, or top 20%.) ...

3. Concerning gender income inequality, Mark Perry says 'Studies' that compare average wages by gender, without controlling for demographic factors, can't be taken seriously

4. Clive Crook thinks an ownership society may be the answer to reducing wealth inequality: Liberals Should Embrace the Ownership Society

... It's true that conservatives' standard proposals for privatizing Social Security and voucherizing Medicare would shift risk onto beneficiaries -- but this plainly isn't a necessary consequence of the basic principle. I agree with Konczal that adequate insurance against economic risk, underwritten by the government, is essential. I also agree that most conservatives aren't interested in providing that guarantee. That's exactly why liberals ought to take up the ownership society themselves.

Ownership entails risk, it's true, but insurance can minimize it. Ownership also provides control, independence and self-respect -- things it wouldn't hurt liberals to be more interested in. And when it comes to inequality and stagnating middle incomes, ownership can give wage slaves a stake in the nation's economic capital.

Done right, an equity component in government-backed saving for retirement could be the best idea liberals have had since the earned-income tax credit (oh, sorry, that started out as a conservative idea as well). ...

5. Scientific American: Massive Open Online Courses, aka MOOCs, Transform Higher Education and Science

6. Scientific American also has an interesting piece on how Brain Researchers Can Detect Who We Are Thinking About

FMRI scans of volunteers' media prefrontal cortexes revealed unique brain activity patterns associated with individual characters or personalities as subjects thought about them.

7. Gizmodo reports that Sex in Space Could Be Deadly.

Researchers already knew humans, animals and plants have evolved in response to Earth's gravity and they are able to sense it. What we are still discovering is how the processes occurring within the cells of the human and plant bodies are affected by the more intense gravity, or hypergravity, that would be found on a large planet, or the microgravity that resembles the conditions on a space craft.

8. Walgreens Building First Self-Powered Store

According to estimations, engineers expect the the store to generate around 265,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) per year. Store operation will only require 200,000 kWh, so perhaps that extra wattage could be pumped back into the grid or used to power nearby utilities.

9. CNN reports on How online ruined dating ... forever

When people can browse potential dates online like items in a catalog, geo-locate hook-ups on an exercise bike just seven feet away, arrange a spontaneous group date with the app Grouper or arrange a bevy of blind dates in succession with Crazy Blind Date, it makes me wonder if all this newfound technological convenience has, in fact, made romance that much more elusive. Now, we may be more concerned with what someone isn't rather than what they are. And as that twenty-something entrepreneur reminded me over coffee, services like OkCupid, and even Facebook, sap a lot of the mystique out of those first few dates. So, sure, it may be easier than ever to score a date, but what kind of date will it really be?

10. Interesting piece on Why Do People Use Nope Even Though No Is Shorter?

11. Is the New Pope More Liberal Than the Last Two? Why It's Hard to Tell. Emily Chertoff offers some insightful analysis.

12. Michael Bird offers this quote from Michael Goheen and Craig Bartholomew's "The Drama of Scripture" in his post The Importance of the Narrative of Scripture.

Many of us have read the Bible as if it were merely a mosaic of little bits – theological bits, moral bits, historical-critical bits, sermon bits, devotional bits. But when we read the Bible in such a fragmented way, we ignore it's divine author's intention to shape our lives through its story. All humanity communities live out some story that provides a context for understanding the meaning of history and gives shape and direction to their lives. If we allow the Bible to become fragmented, it is in danger of being absorbed into whatever other story is shaping our culture, and it will thus cease to shape our lives as it should. Idolatry has twisted the dominant cultural story of the secular Western world. If as believers we allow this story (rather than the Bible) to become the foundation of our thought and action, then our lives will manifest not the truths of Scripture, but the lies of an idolatrous culture. Hence the unity of Scripture is no minor matter: a fragmented Bible may actually produce theologically orthodox, morally upright, warmly pious idol worshippers! (p. 12).

13. Scot McKnight has a great piece on what constitutes legalism: Legalism: Old and New Perspectives

14. Thom S. Rainer on Ten Things Pastors Wish They Knew Before They Became Pastors

1. I wish someone had taught me basic leadership skills. "I was well grounded in theology and Bible exegesis, but seminary did not prepare me for the real world of real people. It would have been great to have someone walk alongside me before my first church."
2. I needed to know a lot more about personal financial issues. "No one ever told me about minister's housing, social security, automobile reimbursement, and the difference between a package and a salary. I got burned in my first church."
3. I wish I had been given advice on how to deal with power groups and power people in the church. "I got it all wrong in my first two churches. I was fired outright from the first one and pressured out in the second one. Someone finally and courageously pointed out how I was messing things up almost from the moment I began in a new church. I am so thankful that I am in the ninth year of a happy pastorate in my third church."...

Read the whole thing.

15. Joseph Sunde rates the 5 TV Shows That Demonstrate the Importance of Ordinary Work

Saturday Links

1. Conventional wisdom says wearing the red shirt in Star Trek will get you killed. Not so fast. Statistical analysis in Significance Magazine disagrees. (Keep your redshirt on: a Bayesian exploration)

"... In spite of wearing a redshirt, there is only an 8.6% chance of a member of the operations or engineering departments becoming a casualty. These personnel should ensure that their life insurance plans are based on their departments and not their uniform color.

Although Enterprise crew members in redshirts suffer many more casualties than crew members in other uniforms, they suffer fewer casualties than crew members in gold uniforms when the entire population size is considered. Only 10% of the entire redshirt population was lost during the three year run of Star Trek. This is less than the 13.4% of goldshirts, but more than the 5.1% of blueshirts. What is truly hazardous is not wearing a redshirt, but being a member of the security department. The red-shirted members of security were only 20.9% of the entire crew, but there is a 61.9% chance that the next casualty is in a redshirt and 64.5% chance this red-shirted victim is a member of the security department. The remaining redshirts, operations and engineering make up the largest single population, but only have an 8.6% chance of being a casualty.

Red uniform shirts are safe, as long as the wearer is not in the security department."

 2. Interesting piece on automation in the Economist: Robocolleague

Robots are getting more powerful. That need not be bad news for workers. ...

... Historically, technological advances have been relatively benign for workers. Labour-market trends through the 19th and 20th centuries show surprising continuity, according to Lawrence Katz of Harvard University and Robert Margo of Boston University. In recent decades, for example, computerisation and automation have displaced “middle-skilled” workers at the same time as employment among high- and low-skilled workers has increased. This “hollowing out” is not new, Messrs Katz and Margo note. Early industrialisation had similar effects. Middle-skilled artisans, like trained weavers, were put out of work by industrial textile production, but the fortunes of less-skilled factory workers and white-collar factory managers steadily improved. Mechanisation’s insatiable appetite for routine work of all types has yet to create mass unemployment. Quite the opposite.

The worry is that technology now has its sights set on non-routine tasks as well as mundane ones. Yet Mr Autor notes that just because a skilled job can be automated does not mean it will be. The number of workers used to build Nissan vehicles varies a lot between Japan, where labour is expensive, and India, where it is abundant and cheap. The relative cost of different types of workers matters for firms as they choose how to deploy new technologies. ...

3. Speaking of technology and its impact on industries Technology Upends Another Industry: Homebuilding

4. Businessweek has a piece about Indie Capitalism

Indie Capitalism has three foundational principles:

• Creativity generates economic value. Creativity is the source of profit. Yes, efficiency can squeeze more out of what exists, but creativity gives us originality, which translates into a market advantage and big margins.

• Creativity drives capitalism. These past few years we have been victimized by the disastrous results of “creativity” applied to the financial sector (mortgage-backed securities, for starters). What we lost sight of is that the scaling of creativity to actually make things of value sold in the marketplace is the true heart of our economic system. It is the true generator of net new jobs, wealth, and tax revenue.

• Creative destruction is crucial to economic growth. Crony capitalism, which relies on monopoly and political power, is antithetical to entrepreneurial capitalism. A faster cycle of birth, growth, and death of companies boosts creativity, economic value, and growth.

5. Business Insider reports on Why Manufacturing Jobs Are Returning To America For The First Time In Decades

 The bottom line: For the first time in decades, several key economic drivers have created a competitive advantage for the U.S. that will encourage corporate strategic decisions on capital allocation and acquisitions for generations to come.

Here's why:

1. Cheap and abundant natural gas. ...

2. Innovation. Despite talk of a brain drain, the U.S. remains the global innovation leader, maintaining a position enjoyed for 50 years. ...

3. Rule of law. Without the means to protect intellectual property, it cannot be exploited for competitive advantage. ...

4. Human capital. The wage gap between the U.S. and China has been shrinking. ...

5. De-complexity. Western multinationals continue to struggle with management of operations in developing countries. ...

6. Public policy and abundance. The federal government appears to be seizing the opportunity to promote job growth at home.

7. Credit, currency and the coming wave of mergers and acquisitions.

6. 3-D Printed Car Is as Strong as Steel, Half the Weight, and Nearing Production.

"Picture an assembly line not that isn’t made up of robotic arms spewing sparks to weld heavy steel, but a warehouse of plastic-spraying printers producing light, cheap and highly efficient automobiles.

If Jim Kor’s dream is realized, that’s exactly how the next generation of urban runabouts will be produced. His creation is called the Urbee 2 and it could revolutionize parts manufacturing while creating a cottage industry of small-batch automakers intent on challenging the status quo. ..."

7. And more about 3-D Printing. 3D Printing On The Frontlines — Army Deploying $2.8M Mobile Fabrication Labs.

Throughout history, war and innovation have gone hand in hand, whether it’s breakthroughs out of heavily funded R&D programs or makeshift contraptions thrown together with spare parts. Soldiers are trained to use the technology on hand to get the job done, one way or the other.

But how would military operations change if soldiers on the battlefield could have the best of both worlds: access to expert engineers able to fabricate custom-designed fixes right on-the-spot and in very little time? ...

8. And how about 4-D printing? 4D Printing Is The Future Of 3D Printing And It’s Already Here

"It may sound strange and far out, but it’s actually quite simple. 4D printing is being billed as a process where synthetic objects can change and adapt themselves to the environment. In a recent TED interview, Tibbits compared the process of 4D printing to the process of natural adaptation:

Natural systems obviously have this built in — the ability to have a desire. Plants, for example, generally have the desire to grow towards light and they generate energy from the translation of photosynthesis, carbon dioxide to oxygen, and so on. This is extremely difficult to build into synthetic systems — the ability to “want” or need something and know how to change itself in order to acquire it, or the ability to generate its own energy source. If we combine the processes that natural systems offer intrinsically (genetic instructions, energy production, error correction) with those artificial or synthetic (programmability for design and scaffold, structure, mechanisms) we can potentially have extremely large-scale quasi-biological and quasi-synthetic architectural organisms."

7. The New York Times reports that Music Industry Sales Rise, and Digital Revenue Gets the Credit

The music industry, the first media business to be consumed by the digital revolution, said on Tuesday that its global sales rose last year for the first time since 1999, raising hopes that a long-sought recovery might have begun.

The increase, of 0.3 percent, was tiny, and the total revenue, $16.5 billion, was a far cry from the $38 billion that the industry took in at its peak more than a decade ago. Still, even if it is not time for the record companies to party like it’s 1999, the figures, reported Tuesday by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, provide significant encouragement.

The Economist also posted this chart this week:

8. Teleworking: The myth of working from home from the BBC. "Yahoo has banned its staff from "remote" working. After years of many predicting working from home as the future for everybody, why is it not the norm?"

9.  Europe's Youth Unemployment Nightmare Started Long Before The Euro Crisis 

"Reasons for high unemployment among the young include ineffective education systems (the share of early school dropouts is 20% in Italy and 30% in Spain) and dual labour markets with highly protected jobs for older employees. The good performance of Germany is not least a result of the German apprenticeship system, which facilitates labour market access for school leavers by lowering the company’s costs for employing them. The OECD’s latest “Going for Growth” report recommends reforms to strengthen the vocational training systems as one of the most effective ways to fight structural youth unemployment. This would also be a reasonable starting point for the EU’s youth employment programme."

10. Benjamin Wright - Book Review: God at Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life by Gene Edward Vieth, Jr.

11. Rough Type: Students to e-textbooks: no thanks

"What’s most revealing about this study is that, like earlier research, it suggests that students’ preference for printed textbooks is reflects the real pedagogical advantages they experience in using the format: fewer distractions, deeper engagement, better comprehension and retention, and greater flexibility to accommodating idiosyncratic study habits. Electronic textbooks will certainly get better, and will certainly have advantages of their own, but they won’t replicate the particular advantages inherent to the tangible form of the printed book."

12. How Many Ph.D.'s Actually Get to Become College Professors?

13. Top 10 Causes of Death in the U.S.

14. ABC reports that Young Hispanics Leaving Catholic Church for Protestant Faith

The Catholic Church has struggled to bring in young members in the United States. Less than half of U.S. Hispanics between 18 and 29 identify as Catholic, compared with the 60+ percent of Hispanics older than 50.

15. Robert Jones says Don't write off mainline Protestants

The narrative of decline in the mainline church underestimates the continuing influence of its members, says a religion researcher.

16. Some interesting observations by NYU psychologist Jonathan Haidt. He says we tend to process our social world through three lenses: Social distance, hierarchy, and disgust. Conservatives tend to have a lower threshold of revulsion, while liberals, and particularly libertarians, have a higher threshold.

17. Bruce Fieler has an interesting piece in the Atlantic. Want to Give Your Family Value and Purpose? Write a Mission Statement

Is Scientific Materialism “Almost Certainly False”?

Scientific American: Is Scientific Materialism “Almost Certainly False”?

... Some scholars, notably philosopher Thomas Nagel, are so unimpressed with science that they are challenging its fundamental assumptions. In his new book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, Nagel contends that current scientific theories and methods can’t account for the emergence of life in general and one bipedal, big-brained species in particular. To solve these problems, Nagel asserts, science needs “a major conceptual revolution,” as radical as those precipitated by heliocentrism, evolution and relativity.

Many pundits calling for such a revolution are peddling some sort of religious agenda, whether Christian or New Age. Nagel is an atheist, who cannot accept God as a final answer, and yet he echoes some theological critiques of science. “Physic-chemical reductionism,” he writes, cannot tell us how matter became animate on Earth more than three billion years ago; nor can it account for the emergence in our ancestors of consciousness, reason and morality. ...

... These qualms asides, I recommend Nagel’s book, which serves as a much-needed counterweight to the smug, know-it-all stance of many modern scientists. Hawking and Krauss both claim that science has rendered philosophy obsolete. Actually, now more than ever we need philosophers, especially skeptics like Socrates, Descartes, Thomas Kuhn and Nagel, who seek to prevent us from becoming trapped in the cave of our beliefs.

Happiness, Meaning, and a Theology of Work

The Atlantic: There's More to Life Than Being Happy  This is a fascinating piece on happiness written by Emily Esfahani Smith as she reflects on the difference between happiness and a meaningful life. I've got some thoughts below but here is one powerful excerpt:

... This is why some researchers are cautioning against the pursuit of mere happiness. In a new study, which will be published this year in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Positive Psychology, psychological scientists asked nearly 400 Americans aged 18 to 78 whether they thought their lives were meaningful and/or happy. Examining their self-reported attitudes toward meaning, happiness, and many other variables -- like stress levels, spending patterns, and having children -- over a month-long period, the researchers found that a meaningful life and happy life overlap in certain ways, but are ultimately very different. Leading a happy life, the psychologists found, is associated with being a "taker" while leading a meaningful life corresponds with being a "giver."

"Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desire are easily satisfied, and difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided," the authors write.

How do the happy life and the meaningful life differ? Happiness, they found, is about feeling good. Specifically, the researchers found that people who are happy tend to think that life is easy, they are in good physical health, and they are able to buy the things that they need and want. While not having enough money decreases how happy and meaningful you consider your life to be, it has a much greater impact on happiness. The happy life is also defined by a lack of stress or worry.

Most importantly from a social perspective, the pursuit of happiness is associated with selfish behavior -- being, as mentioned, a "taker" rather than a "giver." The psychologists give an evolutionary explanation for this: happiness is about drive reduction. If you have a need or a desire -- like hunger -- you satisfy it, and that makes you happy. People become happy, in other words, when they get what they want. Humans, then, are not the only ones who can feel happy. Animals have needs and drives, too, and when those drives are satisfied, animals also feel happy, the researchers point out.

"Happy people get a lot of joy from receiving benefits from others while people leading meaningful lives get a lot of joy from giving to others," explained Kathleen Vohs, one of the authors of the study, in a recent presentation at the University of Pennsylvania. In other words, meaning transcends the self while happiness is all about giving the self what it wants. People who have high meaning in their lives are more likely to help others in need. "If anything, pure happiness is linked to not helping others in need," the researchers write.

What sets human beings apart from animals is not the pursuit of happiness, which occurs all across the natural world, but the pursuit of meaning, which is unique to humans, according to Roy Baumeister, the lead researcher of the study and author, with John Tierney, of the recent book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. Baumeister, a social psychologists at Florida State University, was named an ISI highly cited scientific researcher in 2003.

The study participants reported deriving meaning from giving a part of themselves away to others and making a sacrifice on behalf of the overall group. In the words of Martin E. P. Seligman, one of the leading psychological scientists alive today, in the meaningful life "you use your highest strengths and talents to belong to and serve something you believe is larger than the self." For instance, having more meaning in one's life was associated with doing activities like buying presents for others, taking care of kids, and arguing. People whose lives have high levels of meaning often actively seek meaning out even when they know it will come at the expense of happiness. Because they have invested themselves in something bigger than themselves, they also worry more and have higher levels of stress and anxiety in their lives than happy people. Having children, for example, is associated with the meaningful life and requires self-sacrifice, but it has been famously associated with low happiness among parents, including the ones in this study. In fact, according to Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, research shows that parents are less happy interacting with their children than they are exercising, eating, and watching television.

"Partly what we do as human beings is to take care of others and contribute to others. This makes life meaningful but it does not necessarily make us happy," Baumeister told me in an interview.

Meaning is not only about transcending the self, but also about transcending the present moment -- which is perhaps the most important finding of the study, according to the researchers. While happiness is an emotion felt in the here and now, it ultimately fades away, just as all emotions do; positive affect and feelings of pleasure are fleeting. The amount of time people report feeling good or bad correlates with happiness but not at all with meaning.

Meaning, on the other hand, is enduring. It connects the past to the present to the future. "Thinking beyond the present moment, into the past or future, was a sign of the relatively meaningful but unhappy life," the researchers write. "Happiness is not generally found in contemplating the past or future." That is, people who thought more about the present were happier, but people who spent more time thinking about the future or about past struggles and sufferings felt more meaning in their lives, though they were less happy....

And this is where the church does a great disservice. We form people into clients who look to the church as a route to personal happiness rather than as people who can discern meaning. And this is especially true for a theology of work and daily life. I perceive that the vast majority of Americans either see no meaning in their work as it relates to God's mission in the world, or they find great meaning in their work precisely because it is such an important component to achieving the happiness that comes from getting what we want.

For the most part, the church confirms that daily work has no meaning. Meaningful work, as it relates to God, is the stuff that happens within the four walls of the church or as an extension of some ecclesiastical initiative. Christian service is framed as an alternative to work-a-day life, an escape from meaningless work into meaningful work. Church leaders correctly perceive that many people see no meaning to their daily existence, but the ecclesiastical impulse is to answer the question of meaning over and against daily life, not to find meaning within it.

I see one of two strategies typically at work. One is to simply avoid saying too much about daily work while offering therapeutic spirituality and service opportunities that (for some) supplement a daily meaningless existence or (for others) enhances the meaning we find apart from God and God's mission in the world (essentially supporting idolatry.) The other is to offer prophetic pronouncements against greed and selfishness … correctly challenging idolatries that give false meaning to life … while steering people to participate in just causes like eco-justice, gun control, or poverty advocacy. False ideologies may be challenged, but, once again, the answer is to pursue the meaning question over and against daily life, not to find meaning within it.

Until the church is willing to wrestle with the meaning of work and daily life honestly, the church will never be an effective expression of the Kingdom of God.

Theology in Advent Hymns and Carols

Christmas Day, I wrote about my appreciation for O Come, Emmanuel, because I think it captures the biblical story better than most Advent songs. Jeffrey Barbeau has some good thoughts in his humorously titled Don’t Let N. T. Wright Steal Christmas!

Peter Leithart, remarking on the trendsetting biblical criticism of N. T. Wright, has questioned the way that many (presumably English) Christmas hymns fail to capture the political and social context of the birth of Jesus Christ. Leithart claims that Advent hymns (unlike Christmas hymns) capture the here and now. Advent hymns declare, in this way, a crisp, prophetic vision towards a world gone astray: “They are deeply and thoroughly and thrillingly political. Advent hymns look forward not to heaven but the redemption of Israel and of the nations, the coming of God’s kingdom on earth.”

For Leithart, we would all be better off ridding ourselves of hymns that fail to include the deeply political and social aspects of the original Christmas story. “Wright is no Grinch,” he claims. “He didn’t steal Christmas. What he stole was a false Christmas, a de-contextualized and apolitical Christmas. But we shouldn’t have bought that Christmas in the first place, and should have been embarrassed to display it so proudly on the mantle. Good riddance, and Bah humbug.”

As one who studies the literature of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Christianity (the period that gave us so many of our great English hymns), I must admit that some of Leithart’s critique rings true. Indeed, some of our most beloved hymns contain precisely the kind of otherworldly message that Leithart deplores.

Before we call for a moratorium on Christmas hymns, however, let’s remember that these hymns often contain powerful reminders of profound and, I daresay, eschatological change. We would be wise to listen. ...

Saturday Links

(Like the Kruse Kronicle on Facebook if you want links to daily posts to appear in your Facebook feed.)

I hope you had a great Christmas and are enjoying the holidays.

1. The Huffington Post offers their top religion stories of 2012: 2012 Religion Stories: The Top 10

2. David Gushee reflects on Glen Stassen's A Thicker Jesus: Incarnational Discipleship in a Secular Age: The illnesses of American Christianity

"... The first kind of Christianity avoids reactionary authoritarianism but is often a therapeutic or vanilla mush that fails to ask anything of anybody out of fear of giving offense. The second kind of Christianity offers stern, clear moral directives that attract people seeking the "specific instruction, even confrontation that calls us to grow in discipleship" (p. 6), but disastrously embraces right-wing ideology and baptizes that as the content of Christianity.

Both of these versions of Christianity are so deeply flawed, says Stassen, that both are contributing to the alarming spread of secularism in the U.S. The first version of Christianity is so thin as to lack any particular reason why one would want to get out of bed on Sunday and go to church; the second is so reactionary as to drive thoughtful people into an anti-religious posture if they conclude that religion equals right-wing authoritarianism.

I believe this is a stark but actually quite accurate depiction of the primary problems afflicting the Protestantisms of the left and of the right in the current U.S. setting. ..."

3. When New England Progressives Won't Tolerate Evangelicals. "Once a center of 19th-century evangelism, Northfield, Mass., is unsettled by the prospect of a school with religious aims."

4. Peter Enns with another provocative post: What do Turkey, Bethlehem, and Tennessee Have in Common? They Don't Bode Well for the Conservative Christian Subculture

5. Peter Liethart offers a book review of Peter Brown's new book, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 Ad, at Christianity Today: How the Early Church Made Peace with Prosperity. (And, no, I don't know why everyone seems to be Peter this week ... Enns, Liethart, and Brown.)

6. Why Latin Americans top the happiness rankings

"While not exclusive to Latin America, the culture of family, support, and living a life to spend time with your family, I think, is an important part of Latin American culture that keeps people positive. Being with those close to you and finding other friends and partners that value that way of life is a key part of Latin American culture. That might be the main reason why people remain positive: they are never truly alone. Interestingly, many discussions and documentaries about immigrant groups in the United States show an internal conflict among many who move to the US and who do not wish to lose their support systems in a new culture rooted in individualism. While being motivated and entrepreneurial is valued, a life being with your family, where you are never truly alone, is the basis for many cultures in many parts of the world. Many new Americans frown on the thought that children can detach themselves from their family at 18 years of age. They believe people can only truly thrive as a family."

7. In contrast to Latin American happiness based in family connection, this survey of British children revealed that A 'dad' is tenth most popular Christmas list request for children.

8. Christian Science Monitor reports on Parental leave global comparison: US still among least generous

9. And yet another story on familial collections China orders children to visit their elderly parents.

10. Scientific American reports some positive news: Early Childhood Obesity Rates Might Be Slowing Nation-Wide

11. Men may want to think twice before taking up yoga. It seems men are more prone to serious injury from yoga. Wounded Warrior Pose

12. What are the ten most popular books of all time? The 10 Most Read Books In The World

13. Traditional Books On Decline, Survey Says

"A Pew Internet Research Center survey released Thursday found that the percentage of Americans aged 16 and older who read an e-book grew from 16 percent in 2011 to 23 percent this year. Readers of traditional books dropped from 72 percent to 67 percent. Overall, those reading books of any kind dropped from 78 percent to 75 percent, a shift Pew called statistically insignificant."

14. Here are nine interesting findings about state-by-state data from the Census Bureau: Here Are The States Where People Are Leaving, Moving To, And Having Lots Of Babies

• Puerto Rico, Vermont, and Rhode Island are the only states (and territory) that saw a net decrease in population over the year.
• The fastest growing region was the South (1.06% population growth) followed by the West (1.03% population growth).
• North Dakota and the District of Columbia had the highest population growth, with 2.5% and 2.3% population growth, respectively. Texas, Wyoming, and Utah also saw major growth.
• West Virginia and Maine are the only two states where people are dying faster than they are being born, with 0.93 and 0.99 births for each death.
• Utah (3.44) and Alaska (3.33) had the highest birth to death ratio in 2012. That means 3.44 babies were born for each death in Utah.
• Domestic migration determines the rate that people leave and enter states to and from other states. Per capita, more natives left New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Connecticut and Rhode Island to move somewhere else than any other states.
• On the other hand, people flocked to North Dakota, D.C., Wyoming and South Carolina.
• The states that had the highest rates of international migration — that is, the rate of immigrants coming in — were Hawaii, New Jersey, Florida, New York and D.C.
• Puerto Rico is seeing a massive exodus — 1% of their population left last year.

15. When we think of transportation in the United States, few of us think about river and coastal water transportation. Yet a great many goods and commodities are shipped on our rivers. The Midwest drought is having an impact on a major artery of that transportation network. The Mississippi River's Water Levels Are Dropping, And Could Shut Down Trade Next Week

16. Facebook?! Twitter?! Instagram?! We Did That 40 Years Ago. "Three decades before Yelp and Craigslist, there was the Community Memory Terminal. ..."

 

 17. America's Stuff Is Getting Really Old, And That's Bullish

"In other words, Americans are increasingly likely to have to purchase and replace these goods some time soon as they get more and more worn out. That's bullish for spending, jobs, and the economy as a whole."

18. From right here in my hometown, just a mile or two from where I live: In a Kansas City Neighborhood, Deep Investments and an Uncertain Future. The Atlantic Cities reports on Kansas City's experiments with Green Impact Zones.

19. Why are men, in the aggregate, better navigators than women? National Geographic: Of Men, Navigation, and Zits

"... Yet a few differences between the sexes do seem to hold up to scrutiny. One is spatial abilities. If men look at an object, for example, they are slightly faster at guessing what it would look like if it were rotated 180 degrees. There are plenty of women who do better than individual men. But overall there's a stasticially significant difference in their average performance. This kind of difference carries over from one culture to another. It's even detectable in babies. ...

... Whenever we reflect on human evolution, it pays to compare our species to other animals. And in the case of spatial abilities, the comparison is fascinating. Almost a century ago, the psychologist Helen Hubbet found that male rats could get through a maze faster than females. The difference can also be found in a number of other species. ...

... Clint and his colleagues propose a different explanation: male spatial ability is not an adaptation so much as a side effect. Males produce testosterone as they develop, and the hormone has a clear benefit in terms of reproduction, increasing male fertility. But testosterone also happens to produce a lot of side effects, including male pattern baldness and an increased chance of developing acne. It would be absurd to say acne was an adaptation favored by natural selection. The same goes for the male edge in spatial ability, Clint and his colleagues argue. They note that when male rats are castrated, they do worse at navigating a maze; when they are given shots of testosterone, they regain their skill. ..."